I Was Paying $67/Month for 5 Subscriptions. So I Built One Tool to Replace Them All.

xy k — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:02:03 +0000

Let me guess your browser tabs right now.

Tab 1: remove.bg — removing the background from a product photo
Tab 2: TinyPNG — compressing that same photo so it loads faster
Tab 3: OCR.space — because you need the text from that receipt someone sent you
Tab 4: ChatGPT — writing a product description for the thing you just photographed
Tab 5: PhotoRoom — because remove.bg messed up the edges on the last one

Sound familiar?

The subscription trap

I used to be that person. Every month, $67 disappeared from my bank account for tools I used maybe twice a week. Each one did ONE thing. And each one wanted me to upgrade to a "pro" plan that cost more than my lunch.

The worst part? I was building a SaaS product myself. I knew how this worked. I knew the psychology behind freemium, the "upgrade now" popups, the artificially limited free tiers. And yet there I was, paying for 5 different tools to do what should've been one workflow.

So I did what any reasonable developer would do: I got annoyed, opened VS Code, and built my own.

PixelForge AI: The "one tab" solution

Here's what I built: https://pixelforgeai.club

16 tools. One dashboard. No more tab chaos.

The free stuff (no signup, seriously)

Image compression — drop a PNG, get an 80% smaller file. That's it. No account needed.
Format conversion — PNG to JPG, JPG to WebP, whatever you need.
Resize — preset sizes for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or custom dimensions.
Photo enhancement — auto-fix blurry or underexposed photos.

These are genuinely free. No watermark. No "you've used your 3 free conversions today." I built them as client-side tools because they don't need AI — they just need a browser.

The AI tools (these cost me money to run, hence credits)

Background removal — 2 seconds. Handles hair, fur, transparent objects. Better than some tools I was paying $12/month for.
Image upscaling — 4x enlargement with AI detail preservation. Your 200x200 logo can now be 800x800 without looking like a Minecraft texture.
OCR — reads text from images in 100+ languages. Receipts, screenshots, handwritten notes (mostly).
AI writer — product descriptions, ad copy, blog outlines. Not perfect, but good enough to not start from a blank page.
Speech-to-text — upload audio, get a transcript. Useful for meetings you didn't pay attention to.
Video generation — type a prompt, get a short video clip. It's wild that this is possible now.

Pricing (because everything can't be free forever)

Free: 10 AI credits/month + unlimited free tools
Starter: $9.99/month for 100 credits
Pro: $19.99/month for 300 credits

One credit = one AI task. Simple. A background removal costs the same as an OCR scan. Video generation costs 10 credits because, well, it actually costs me about $0.50 per video.

What I learned building this

1. Ship with 4 tools, not 16

I launched with background removal, compression, conversion, and OCR. The rest came later. If I'd waited until I had 16 polished tools, I'd still be coding.

2. Free tools are your marketing budget

I can't afford Facebook ads. But I can afford to let people compress images for free forever. Most people who try the free tools eventually sign up for AI features. The conversion funnel is built into the product.

3. Being a solo dev from China is... interesting

I built this on a Tencent Cloud server in Shanghai, deployed to Vercel, and I can't even visit my own production site without a VPN. The Great Firewall blocks Vercel domains. So I test everything through a proxy API I built (which I really need to delete before someone finds it).

4. "Good enough" beats "perfect but unreleased"

My first version of the image generator literally returned "No image returned" because I used the wrong version hash. Embarrassing? Yes. Fixable in 10 minutes? Also yes. The user who reported it probably doesn't even remember.

The part where I ask you to try it

If you're tired of paying for 5 subscriptions to do basic creative tasks, give PixelForge AI a shot: https://pixelforgeai.club

The free tools work without even creating an account. Just drop an image and see what happens.

And if you're a fellow indie hacker building something cool, I'd love to hear about it. The solo dev community is the best part of building in public.

Built with Next.js, deployed on Vercel, powered by Replicate AI. One human, too much coffee, and an unreasonable number of browser tabs reduced to one.

DEV Community: xy k