Building a Text-to-Image Pipeline with Next.js — Architecture Decisions

When I built the backend for free AI image generator no credit card, the core challenge was connecting a Next.js frontend to a GPU inference endpoint efficiently. Here's the architecture thinking — not the specific implementation, but the decisions that shaped it.

The Core Architecture Problem

Text-to-image generation has an unusual request profile:

Each request is computationally expensive (GPU inference)

Requests are unpredictable — traffic spikes randomly