Unified API vs. direct vendor: how to choose your text-to-image integration

A solo developer has shared a practical framework for deciding whether to route text-to-image generation through a unified API or integrate directly with a single vendor. The core advice is to use a unified layer when image generation is just one of many features, pinning the model ID in config and avoiding the overhead of managing multiple vendor keys, SDKs, and invoices. Direct integration makes more sense when images are the core product, when cutting-edge parameters are needed immediately after a vendor releases them, or when concurrency and cold-start controls are critical. The author highlights that protocol compatibility — specifically whether a unified layer speaks the OpenAI wire format — matters more than model selection, since it allows workloads to be moved with minimal code changes. Platforms like Infrai and OpenRouter are cited as examples, with the distinction that the latter is a model router rather than a full backend service.