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:marseycoin: Photopea: The Free Photoshop Alternative Making Millions :marseydrawing1:

https://www.the5to9.xyz/p/photopea-free-photoshop-alternative-making-millions

Photopea has been a godsend for me personally since I use a Chromebook (:marseylaughpoundfist:) which means that I don't have to RDP into one of my machines running Windows to use Photoshop 99% of the time :!marseycodecellove:

Dude's very talented IMO, I use his UPNG encoder to compress my png files too. Faster load speeds = More $$ :marseyjewoftheorient: RIOT's probably better by a little bit but it requires Windows :marseyantiwork2:

Orange Site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521

Adobe Photoshop is the most popular image editing tool in the world. It's used by over 29 million people and has become a household name.

But it has a few problems. It takes up a ton of computing power and battery, which makes it difficult to use on old/slow computers. And the biggest thing, cost.

You can't just buy Photoshop with a one-time fee, instead, users spend $20/mo for a subscription to use the product.

Ivan Kutskir saw these shortcomings as an opportunity and created Photopea a free, web-based image-editing tool. And its doing crazy well. Here are some numbers:

  • 10 million MAU and $2 million ARR

  • Completely owned by Ivan

  • $60/mo business expense with zero paid marketing

How it all started

You might be thinking, "how did one person build this?". Well, Ivan had a lot of time.

When Photopea started in 2012, Ivan was a full-time student. Photopea's initial version was a simple PDS viewer, and Ivan treated this as a hobby.

If there was a video game that was more fun, he would play that instead of working on Photopea. But Ivan would incrementally build out advanced features while studying. Including his own PDF parser, content-aware fill feature, and even supporting GIFs.

After completing his master's degree in 2017, Ivan solved 400 bugs/feature requests from users, produced several open-source libraries, and turned Photopea from a hobby into a powerful image editor and his full-time job.

But monetizing and growing Photopea wasn't easy!

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1684135119753061.webp

From 2012 - 2016, Photopea had no monetization plans built in. And after graduation, Ivan only produced $29k in the first year and a half of monetizing.

Despite this, Photopea had positive user responses and the user base was growing quickly (~300%) through organic means.

Then, it all clicked.

YouTubers began sharing video tutorials on how to use Photopea, and many of these got hundreds of thousands of views!

And in October 2018, Photopea hit an all-time high of 1.5 million visits, setting it up for one of its biggest marketing campaigns: AMAs

In Nov 2018, Ivan hosted his first Reddit AMA. It went viral. 50k upvotes, 2.2k comments.

9 months later, his traffic doubled to 3 million visits, and he did another one.

Viral again, and he kept repeating. In 2021, he decided to host one on Hacker News. And just like Reddit, it made the front page and went viral again!

As it turns out, this was the ultimate marketing campaign. Creating a free version of a complex product like Photoshop attracts people because it saves them money (hundreds a year).

But sharing how you built this and garnered millions of users and revenue makes ultra-viral content. And Ivan utilized this to the fullest.

It's the exact type of thing that makes people want to share with people like Pieter Levels tweeting about it, random people hunting it on Product Hunt, etc.

Heck, even I'm writing about it!

Photopea only costs $60/mo to maintain

You probably don't believe it only costs $500 a year for a business that makes millions.

But it's true. Photopea is web-based, but it also is completely built using Javascript with no backend. This means it works offline with no internet connection and doesn't require huge computing power.

Instead, Ivan's main costs are just hosting a simple webpage, which makes this super easy to maintain (no server work) and incredibly cheap to support.

Additionally, Photopea has been primarily worked on and maintained by Ivan. He grew his team by adding two of his previous college mates in the last few months. But Ivan still says he does about 80% of the work.

Conclusion

Photopea is an advanced image editing tool that rivals Adobe Photoshop and is built by one person, Ivan Kutskir. But these features weren't built in a day, Ivan spent the better part of 10 years slowly building out Photopea! He's solved over 4,000 feature requests and issues on GitHub alone!

With no paid marketing, Photopea found success through AMAs and old-fashioned, word-of-mouth sharing.

As Ivan says, "if you make a free analogy to an expensive product, users will (eventually) use your product. There is simply no other way."

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better than gimp?

:marseyforevertiedup:

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I dono never used GIMP, Photopea's UI is almost a copy of Photoshop which would be easier for r-slurs like me to pick up

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I was about to come in here and lambast you for not stan'ing GIMP but this does seem pretty based. While GIMP can do a lot of things I liken it more to a crate engine. Very powerful but it takes skilled hands to utilize it. This seems more akin to a free car less technically skilled twinks can hop in and drive. As something of a terrible meme artist myself anything that means more shitposts is a good thing!

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Photopea is awesome. I've been using it to make Marseys. :marseylove:

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More like photopee :marseyemojirofl:

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Saved. I am definitely too r-slurred to learn gimp.

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https://i.rdrama.net/images/16841392179339917.webp

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old thread but wondering if this is a legit copy? (or did you pay real money for it or someshit)

I'm tired of using GIMP but I must be getting too old to pirate stuff becaause all the bootleg adobe sources i'm finding have mix reputations despite clean deep scan reports

Extending this question to @chiobu as well. Photopea looks good but I want to use them CUDAs since GIMP is CPU bound and doesn't really scale well w/4k resolution

![](https://media.giphy.com/media/1GT5PZLjMwYBW/giphy.webp)

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Thanks, will check it out!

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i edited in a link to a photoshop release there in case you missed it

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Perfect thanks! <3<3<3

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its pirated, who buys photoshop if its not for the job, I got it at https://old.reddit.com/r/GenP/comments/qpcnob/friendly_reminder_to_new_folks/?depth=9&sort=controversial

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Nice thanks! Yeah I was joking as the only legit copy imo is pirated lol

I guess I got some reading to do or something to get this config, thanks again!

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:#marseysmug: ![](/images/16668678064393978.webp)

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galadriel will frick you up chiobu

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who is galadriel

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Used photoPEEPEE for art and art class. Great software

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Navigating your profile to find this post was an experience. And at the end I realized I had it saved and just didn't bother to check.

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Snapshots:

Photopea:

UPNG encoder:

RIOT:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33334521:

Ivan Kutskir:

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1684129301602733.webp:

first Reddit AMA:

he did another one.:

host one on Hacker News:

Pieter Levels tweeting about it:

Product Hunt:

4,000 feature requests:

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