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Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
Hi HN,
Removing the background from images is a surprisingly common image processing task, and AI has made it really easy. The technology has come a long way since segment leader remove.bg launched here on hn in Dec 2018 [1]. Chasing remove.bg's success, a legion of providers have come on the market offering varying levels of quality & service.
Despite there being a large number of competing services, most still price for very high (~95%?) gross margins. Furthermore, subscriptions make the effective unit price a lot higher than the list price for infrequent users, and requires effort & attention to ensure you're getting value for money. This has prevented a host of use cases (e.g. infrequent professional / hobbyist) and business models (e.g. ad-supported websites & mobile apps).
We see this as an opportunity where we can jump to the market's logical conclusion to gain market share and build goodwill: cost-plus PAYGO pricing, i.e. the "S3 pricing model".
So we've built yet-another image background removal service ( https://pixian.ai https://pixian.ai - introductory post 6 months ago [2], a ton has been improved since then) but with a couple of twists:
1. Quantified quality comparison (90-120% of remove.bg, depending on image category), free for you to check your own images so you can make an informed choice.
2. Customer-friendly pricing (PAYGO @ 1-10% of competitors' subscriptions) with a generous free tier (and free while in beta).
3. A novel API result format: Delta PNG [3], which offers excellent latency & bandwidth savings. Especially useful for mobile apps.
4. Operational transparency: actual volume & latency metrics public, with more coming soon (all API providers should be showing this).
There's of course more to it than just price and we see several sources of differentiation in this market: quality, price, capability, reliability, latency, and goodwill.
As a new entrant we're looking to meet-or-beat the quality bar; beat on price, capability, reliability and latency; and to build up goodwill over time.
Our goal is to make it a no-brainer for new accounts to choose us, and to provide the tools and guidance necessary for existing accounts to make the switch with confidence.
We'd love for you to try it out and to hear your thoughts!
https://pixian.ai https://pixian.ai
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439405
[3] https://pixian.ai/api/deltaPng https://pixian.ai/api/deltaPng
- throwaway888abc 3y agoBookmarked, will use. If I can upvote twice, I would. >Philosophy >While AI is rapidly transforming the way we as a society do business, AI itself is changing even faster. What was >cutting edge only a few years ago is now rapidly becoming commoditized. >We choose to accept and accelerate this reality. >We therefore see ourselves less as a tech startup, and more as an outsourced MLOps extension to your engineering team. >Our goal is to be more 'S3' and less 'Adobe' for state-of-the-art AI image processing. Well done and well said. Wish many hearths won
- jacobn 3y agoThank you!
- ullarah 3y agoThe comparisons show a legend but the keys are all the same colour? Is that intentional?
- jacobn 3y agoAh, it's not, will fix, thanks for pointing that out!
- seper8 3y agoYou can do this yourself for free, using the U2NET model... Either client-side or server side. https://github.com/xuebinqin/U-2-Net https://github.com/xuebinqin/U-2-Net Pretty trivial thing to implement.
- redox99 3y agoFor a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by [...]
- totetsu 3y agosending your photos to your iphone, tapping and holding on the object, and taping the share option that pops up over the foreground item, then choosing save image. then you can send that new image with the background removed back to your linux system. How to send and receive image between linux and iphone is left as an exercise for the reader.