The Problem with Modern Image Converters
We’ve all been there: You need a quick WebP for a blog post or a project. You Google "PNG to WebP," click the first link, and then... you wait.
You wait for the upload. You wait for the server to process it. And most importantly, you give your data away. Most free tools are "black boxes"—you have no idea if your images are being stored or used to train models.
Introducing WebPit
I built WebPit to fix this. It’s a minimalist, high-speed utility that does one thing: converts your images to WebP without them ever leaving your browser.
Why Client-Side?
By moving the conversion engine to the user’s browser (using modern JS), we get three massive wins:
Privacy: Your images stay on your machine. Period.
Speed: No upload/download bottlenecks. It’s as fast as your local CPU.
Efficiency: It doesn't cost me (the dev) massive server fees, so it stays free for you.
The Tech Stack
- Frontend: Next.js & Vercel
- Core: Client-side canvas rendering for instant conversion.
- Ethics: No signups, no tracking, no bloat.
Check it out here: webpit.site
Top comments (2)
Love the privacy-first approach. I've been burned by those "free" online converters too — one even injected metadata into the output file, which was a fun surprise to find in production.
Quick question: are you using
canvas.toBlob()with theimage/webpMIME type for the conversion, or something like libwebp compiled to WASM? The canvas approach is dead simple but you lose some quality control compared to the WASM route. Curious which trade-off you went with.Also, have you thought about adding a quality slider? Most of the time I want WebP for web optimization and being able to dial it down to like 75-80% quality can cut file sizes in half with barely visible difference. Could be a nice v2 feature.
The "no signups, no tracking" stance is refreshing. Bookmarked it.
Thanks for checking it out. The quality slider is already there. Right now i am using canvas.toBlob. as you said its simple. Sure you lose some quality but keeping the slider to 75 to 80% you wont notice much quality degradation and size reduction massive.