TL;DR
For a junior-friendly web app, I would choose the text-to-image API with the clearest REST request, stable documentation, and most predictable response format, not the longest model menu. My test is deliberately boring: can I validate one payload, make one generation call, preserve error details, and swap providers without rewriting the app?
How should a Node.js web app choose an image API?
Start with the boundary your application owns. In my projects, the browser sends a prompt to a Node.js server route, the server calls an image provider, and the UI receives an application-level result. The provider should never dictate the shape used by every React component. I learned this in notebooks first: provider-shaped objects feel convenient until the second experiment, when half the evaluation harness becomes adapter code.
For an MVP, I score developer experience on four things: authentication that fits in one obvious header, a small request schema, documentation I can follow without guessing, and a response I can normalize once. Model discovery also matters because it lets the available catalog change without forcing a rewrite of the generation path. I don't reward controls that my product does not use.
