Head to head · Image generation · October 2026 research run

Iris-3B vs SurgePix API

Iris-3B scores 51.3 (D) on agent readiness against SurgePix API's 36 (F), and leads in every scored category. Both do image generation.

Best image generation for AI agents · All 120 image comparisons

Which one, for what

Iris-3B D

Best for An agent on a machine with a CUDA GPU that needs Apache-2.0 image generation, relative depth or 4x restoration without a vendor account.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 45 against 15
  • Schema & documentation, 47 against 40
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 20
  • Transparency & trust, 52 against 28

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

No package on PyPI, no version tags, no changelog and no CI workflow. Install is a git clone and pip install -e .

SurgePix API F

Best for An agent that needs finished marketing assets, such as posters, slide decks, Xiaohongshu carousels, logos and translated images, as one file from a short request.

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

Only background removal and upload are in the public API reference, with no OpenAPI file or llms.txt

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Payments & pricing Iris-3B +40

Iris-3B 60

Free Apache-2.0 software with nothing to buy, so 20 + 20 + 20 for pricing, free use and no sign-up. No payment protocol (0). There is no hosted API. Hardware is the owner's cost.

SurgePix API 20

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plan prices and monthly credits are public, but credits are spent per token with no per-call price for any API task, so plan-only pricing (10). A free plan with 25 credits a day. The pages don't say whether a card is needed or whether a free account can create API keys, so half, a judgement call (10). A person signs up in a browser and creates the key in settings (0). 0+10+10+0 = 20.

Reliability Iris-3B +30

Iris-3B 45

Read as local software, since Iris-3B is a model the owner runs. No package on PyPI. Install is a git clone and pip install -e ., with Python 3.11 or newer, PyTorch 2.7.1 or newer and an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA stated (12 of 20). The repository has 23 pytest files covering the model, flow, checkpoints and parallel training, but no CI workflow, so nothing shows them passing on main (5 of 25). Three GitHub issues in ten days, none a crash, two closed and one open announcing a community ComfyUI port. Six Hugging Face discussions, none a bug report (20 of 25). No tags, releases or changelog. Package version 0.1.0, and new checkpoints are added in folders of one Hub repository with no version pins (3 of 15). Released as a final checkpoint with no beta label, but the package is 0.1.0 and the project ten days old (5 of 15).

SurgePix API 15

Read with the hosted lines. No status page was found on surgepix.ai or in the docs, and status.surgepix.ai doesn't resolve (0). With no history to read, the incident line takes the floor (5). No rate limits with numbers are documented. The terms say "non-human continuous or frequent query operations" lead to automatic account suspension, with no threshold given (0). No 429 or backoff guidance. The skill scripts poll every 2 seconds for up to 5 to 15 minutes, but that is client code, not a documented policy (0). No SLA, and the terms disclaim uninterrupted service (0). The API isn't labelled beta or preview, and API keys have been self-serve since 2 June 2026 per the changelog (10). 0+5+0+0+0+10 = 15.

Transparency & trust Iris-3B +24

Iris-3B 52

Apache-2.0 for code and weights, with a NOTICE file, a third-party licence table and the full training and distillation recipe. The training images and the Turbo prompt sets are not released or named in the README or card (25 of 30). Self-hosted, so inputs stay on the owner's hardware, but we found no statement saying so and speridlabs.com has no privacy policy (15 of 30). No deprecation policy, version tags or pinned revisions (2 of 20). No telemetry calls found in the inference code. Training defaults to report_to: wandb, which sends run config and validation images to Weights & Biases, can be set to none, and is not mentioned in the README (8 of 20).

SurgePix API 28

The editorial half. A closed service whose terms name no company or address. They restrict any commercial use of what the service produces without SurgePix's permission, and contain clauses from an unrelated product (a "big data" query platform and "non-resume content"). The skills are MIT. Unclear terms, with a little credit for the open skills (5). The privacy policy is dated both 10 June 2026 and 1 July 2022, describes WeChat and phone registration and "domestic servers", and gives no retention periods. The API reference says uploads go to Tencent Cloud storage in Seoul as public URLs. No DPA. The statements don't agree (5). No deprecation policy or notices, and the terms let changes take effect on publication without notice (0). Tencent Cloud Object Storage in ap-seoul is named in the API reference, and Alipay and WeChat Pay in the privacy policy. No subprocessor list or stated data location (4). 5+5+0+4 = 14.

Schema & documentation Iris-3B +7

Iris-3B 47

Read for a model the owner runs through a CLI and a Python package. No server, OpenAPI or other machine-readable contract. The CLI uses argparse with typed flags and help text, and the Python functions carry type hints. The demo Spaces' Gradio API lists typed endpoints, but Speridlabs doesn't document it (8 of 25). No llms.txt. The README and model card are Markdown in each repository (5 of 10). The card and README state limits (unreliable rendered text and object counts, about one megapixel, depth relative not metric, Turbo's fixed schedule and lower seed variety) but not intended or out-of-scope uses (14 of 20). Flags are typed, with the size presets as an enum only in the Spaces. Height and width take any integer, though Turbo was distilled at seven sizes (9 of 15). Commands for every model and a tips table, but no documented errors (7 of 15). No versioning or changelog beyond dated commits (4 of 15).

SurgePix API 40

No OpenAPI or other machine-readable contract was found (0). surgepix.ai/llms.txt returns 404. The docs are HTML pages, but the 15 SKILL.md files in the MIT repository are Markdown written for agents, so half (5). The API reference states the purpose of each of its five operations and the async and session model. The SKILL.md files add trigger phrases and explicit do-not-use routing between skills, but 11 of the task endpoints the skills call appear only in their scripts, with no reference (10). Parameter tables give type and required for the documented operations, with no enums or limits, and the undocumented endpoints have no schema at all (7). JSON examples for every documented operation and an error table with 401, 404 and error.file.sensitive_content (10). A dated public changelog from 11 March 2026, but no version in the API path and no API-specific change notes (8). 0+5+10+7+10+8 = 40.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runIris-3BSurgePix APIEdge
Reliability16%204515Iris-3B +30
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.24740Iris-3B +7
Agent ergonomics13%16.25453Iris-3B +1
Security & auth14%17.54441Iris-3B +3
Payments & pricing10%12.56020Iris-3B +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87066Iris-3B +4
Transparency & trust7%8.85228Iris-3B +24
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 51.3/100F 36/100

Facts side by side

FactIris-3BSurgePix API
KindModel APIHTTP API
VendorSperidlabsSurgePix
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.surgepix.ai/api
TransportsHTTP
AuthNoneAPI key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (code and weights)Proprietary hosted service under the Surgepix User Agreement, which names no company and restricts commercial use without SurgePix's permission. The agent skills repository is MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-122026-10-23
Terms last updatedno document linkedno date given
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-06-10
Customer content may train modelsnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot read yetyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot read yetnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot read yetnot found in the text
Popularity175 starsnone

How the scores have moved

Iris-3B

SurgePix API

No score change since it was listed.

Verdicts

Iris-3B

Code and weights are Apache-2.0, and one Python package runs text-to-image, a 4-step Turbo, depth and 4x restoration from a documented CLI. It is ten days old, with no PyPI package, version tags, changelog or CI, needs an NVIDIA GPU and about 12 GB of weights, and has no server or API of its own.

SurgePix API

A small, readable API with async tasks and MIT skill scripts that cover posters, decks, edits and translation. Only background removal is documented, the terms name no company and restrict commercial use and automated querying, and uploaded files become public URLs.

Before you call either

Iris-3B

  1. Check for an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA and Python 3.11 or newer before downloading. The base weights are about 12 GB, and Qwen3-VL-4B downloads on the first run
  2. Exclude depth/*, upscaler/* and turbo/* in hf download unless those models are needed. Each of the first two adds about 12 GB
  3. Don't pass --steps, --cfg-scale, --negative-prompt, --order or --shift with a Turbo checkpoint. The script exits with an error
  4. Pass --seed to reproduce an image, and set --outdir, since files are named after the prompt and a repeat run overwrites them
  5. Load only exported directories (model.safetensors and config.yaml). A training .pth is read with torch.load(weights_only=False), so never load one from an untrusted source

SurgePix API

  1. Send the key as the raw authorization header value, with no Bearer prefix
  2. Don't upload confidential files. The upload flow returns a public URL for every file
  3. Check code in the JSON body as well as the HTTP status, since failures come back as a non-zero code with a msg
  4. Poll GET /tasks/{taskId} within 24 hours, after which the task returns 404
  5. Get written permission before using outputs commercially, since the terms restrict commercial use

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Iris-3B or SurgePix API?

Iris-3B scores 51.3 (D) on agent readiness against SurgePix API's 36 (F), and leads in every scored category.

Do Iris-3B and SurgePix API need an API key?

Iris-3B needs no key. SurgePix API needs an API key.

Can an agent call Iris-3B and SurgePix API without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Iris-3B. SurgePix API has a hosted endpoint at https://api.surgepix.ai/api.

Are Iris-3B and SurgePix API open source?

Iris-3B is open source (Apache-2.0 (code and weights)). No open-source release is listed for SurgePix API.

Other comparisons with Iris-3B or SurgePix API

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