A cheap, simple, well-documented image processing API for developers. Resize, convert, compress and strip EXIF in one call. Built and run by Axiom Testing Ltd. → purlo.dev
Purlo is a small, developer-friendly image processing API from Axiom Testing Ltd. The big platforms — Cloudinary, imgix, imagekit — are powerful but pricey and overwhelming for a solo dev who just needs to make user uploads web-safe. Purlo is the opposite: one chainable endpoint that resizes, converts, compresses and strips EXIF/GPS in a single call, documented so you can integrate in ten minutes, priced for small players. Images are processed in memory and discarded — never stored. A generous free tier lets you try it in five minutes, no card required.
Our stack
Node (ESM) + Express, with sharp (libvips) doing the image work — resize, convert, compress and strip in one fast, memory-light library. SQLite via better-sqlite3 for accounts, keys and usage counts (never image data). Stripe for billing and self-service Customer Portal; Resend for transactional email; ipaddr.js for SSRF address classification on the URL-fetch input. Runs in Docker behind host nginx + Let's Encrypt on a single Hetzner VPS, with nightly SQLite backups and external uptime monitoring. Deliberately boring and solo-maintainable — scale up before scaling out.
