I Generated 35 Million AI Images. The Model Was Never the Product.

Most teams building with AI image generation APIs obsess over which model to use. FLUX or Stable Diffusion? Which checkpoint? Which LoRA? I ran an AI headshot company that generated over 35 million images in two years. Crossed $2.2M in revenue. Hit 87% gross margins. And the model we used was open source. Free. The model was never what made it work. The workflow around the model was. Here's what I learned building AI image pipelines at scale, and why most teams get the architecture completely...