Part of an ongoing build-in-public series on Convertify, a free image/file converter I build solo. This week: background removal. The honest version, with the walls I hit.
Most "remove image background" tutorials end with pip install rembg and a happy screenshot. Mine started with a constraint: my whole backend is Rust, and I did not want to bolt a Python process onto it just to run one model.
Here is how the week went. The good parts, and the three or four times I stared at a compiler error wondering if the constraint was worth it.
The starting point
Convertify is a free image converter. The backend is Rust + Axum + libvips, the model has to run CPU-only on a modest VPS, and there is no GPU anywhere in the budget. The obvious path for background removal is rembg, which is excellent, but it is Python and ships as a separate server process. Adding it would mean a second runtime, a second thing to deploy, a second thing to crash at 3am.
