I saw the "I built 184 free browser tools" post on HN last week — 88 points, solid discussion. A lot of comments were asking the same questions: "How do you make money?" "Why would you do this for free?" "What's the catch?"
I built SmartImgKit, a free online image tools site with 20+ tools — compressor, converter, resizer, background remover, watermark tool, meme generator, GIF editor, and more. All browser-based, no uploads, no signup.
I've been thinking about the same questions. Here's where I landed.
The gap in the market
The image editing market is split between heavy desktop software (Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity) and SaaS tools with monthly subscriptions. Neither works well for the person who needs to crop one image, remove a background from another, and convert a HEIC file to JPEG in the same hour.
