Choosing an Image Generation Model for Web Apps: Test Quality, Latency and Portability First

The article argues that the right image model depends on meeting a measured quality bar within a web application's latency and retry limits, not on a single impressive demo. It uses an edtech example that turns supplier-invoice text into visual lesson material, where slow or duplicated jobs are the main operational risk. The author recommends a fixed evaluation set covering ordinary, long, and OCR-broken prompts, with each result tracked for quality, p50 and p95 latency, timeouts, and retries. A narrow adapter interface is proposed so the pipeline does not depend on any specific provider, allowing controlled fallback. Hosted and self-managed deployments are presented as trade-offs with different failure surfaces and responsibilities.