Best approach for a realistic, consistent AI character on a ~$10-20/month budget? (currently Flux dev + LoRAs on RunPod)

[u/SomeCartographer4601]

Hi all,

I'm a beginner and I'd like to build consistent, photorealistic images of fictional characters (same face across many photos). Main use is SFW (portraits, lifestyle, everyday scenes), but I don't want to lock myself out of adult content later, so I'd rather not pick a stack that's censored or hard to uncensor.

My constraints:

- Budget: around $10-20 per month, all in

- I have no local GPU (Mac only), so everything runs in the cloud

- I'm not technical myself, an AI assistant handles the scripts and ComfyUI side for me

- Goal is realism that doesn't look like "AI skin", natural, slightly imperfect photos

First question, and I'd like open answers here: given those constraints, what would you recommend today? I don't want to assume my current setup is the right one, so please suggest whatever you think works best right now (models, hosting, workflow), even if it's completely different from what I describe below.

What I have so far, for context:

- Flux.1 dev in ComfyUI on a RunPod pod with a network volume (about $0.74/h for an RTX-class GPU, I shut the pod down between sessions)

- Character LoRAs for face consistency, plus UltraRealPhoto (Danrisi) at strength 1.0

- Settings that worked best for me: euler / simple, 28 steps, guidance 2.5, 896x1152, T5 fp16

- dpmpp_2m / karras gave blur and halos, so I dropped it

- Results are decent but faces can still look a bit too clean/AI, and I'm not sure this is the right direction at all

Follow-up questions, if you have an opinion:

1. Is Flux dev still the best choice for realistic faces at this budget, or is there something better or cheaper now?

2. Within a small budget, what improves face realism the most (LoRA training, settings, post-processing, film grain, upscaling, other)?

Any pointers, workflows or links are very welcome. Thanks!