Commissions are professional work. If you need speed to get things done, you can pay to rent the GPU and the cost will be negligible to what you earn, even if you're just starting. This is really not
that much of a barrier compared to the hoops hobbyist 3D artists had to jump through 20 years ago.
Regardless, you can run SD on a several years old laptop just fine, this is entirely within the reach of most; yes you won't be getting realtime updates but that's not really necessary.
And that's only the beginning. SD was trained using really poor data; everybody is doing that on semi-synthetic datasets with much higher quality labeling now; high quality data and new advancements (see the Beyond U paper [1], for example) allow fitting more into several times less weights with much faster inference. In a year or two, this will be available to practically everyone.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20092
