I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign.

Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.

So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.

Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.