Running this at home is only free like mining cryptocurrency is free if you didn't buy your computer and don't pay for the electricity. Plus you can only run it on the computer that has the good graphics card, which probably isn't your laptop.

I expect most people aren't going to be generating images all day, so using a cloud-based service for occasional use will still make a lot of sense.

Stable Diffusion offers a paid service to do this too, and there's nothing wrong with that business model. Prices will probably come down, though.