If you just want the recommendation: call a plain REST image generation endpoint from your Node.js backend, keep the prompt-in / image-out path as dumb as you can stand, and add a chat model on top only when you actually need policy checks or structured prompts. For a first text-to-image feature inside a SaaS app, that is the entire architecture worth building.
I've shipped that feature twice. Both times the generation call was the boring part.
What ate the calendar was everything around it: deciding whether the output was safe to show a paying customer, reading the licence terms closely enough to know we could put generated art in a customer's exported PDF, storing the result somewhere that wasn't the provider's temporary URL, and — the part I got wrong, which I'll come back to — making retries safe. I run a one-person company, so I optimise for the number of moving parts I have to keep in my head at 2am, and a text-to-image feature that pulls in three new vendors is a feature I'll quietly regret. Your priorities may be different if you have an infra team.
What should I look for in a text-to-image API for a SaaS app?
Four things, in the order they'll actually hurt you.
