CutLift

01 The problem

AI photo tools usually mean uploading your photos to someone else's server and paying per credit. CutLift set out to give people the same tools for free, with the AI running on their own computer or phone.

02 What I built

I designed, built and launched CutLift as my own product, from the editor and the on-device AI to accounts, the Pro subscription and the launch.

The AI runs locally in the browser, using the device's graphics card when it has one, so photos are never uploaded. It works on Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android with nothing to install.

It launched publicly and has grown to more than 4,000 users.

03 Highlights

• 71 tools in six groups: select and cut out, retouch, colour and light, crop and size, design, and files and data.
• Background removal, object removal, healing brush, clone stamp, liquify, curves and levels, sky replacement, generative fill and ×2 / ×4 upscaling.
• 18 quick converters (JPG, PNG, WebP, resize, compress, watermark) that batch up to 100 images into one ZIP.
• Opens JPG, PNG, WebP, PSD and Camera RAW; exports transparent PNG and WebP, SVG outlines and masks.
• Dataset export for machine learning: COCO JSON, YOLO segmentation and label maps, with classes per layer.
• Free forever for unlimited AI background removal; a Pro plan for the advanced tools.

04 Under the hood

• On-device AI inference in the browser, GPU-accelerated where available
• Native PSD and Camera RAW decoding
• COCO / YOLO dataset generation from layers
• Subscription billing with Dodo Payments