[HN Gopher] Show HN: Image background removal without annoying s...
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Show HN: Image background removal without annoying subscriptions
Hi HN, Removing the background from images is a surprisingly
common image processing task, and AI has made it really easy. The
technology has come a long way since segment leader remove.bg
launched here on hn in Dec 2018 [1]. Chasing remove.bg's success, a
legion of providers have come on the market offering varying levels
of quality & service. Despite there being a large number of
competing services, most still price for very high (~95%?) gross
margins. Furthermore, subscriptions make the effective unit price a
lot higher than the list price for infrequent users, and requires
effort & attention to ensure you're getting value for money. This
has prevented a host of use cases (e.g. infrequent professional /
hobbyist) and business models (e.g. ad-supported websites & mobile
apps). We see this as an opportunity where we can jump to the
market's logical conclusion to gain market share and build
goodwill: cost-plus PAYGO pricing, i.e. the "S3 pricing model". So
we've built yet-another image background removal service (
https://pixian.ai - introductory post 6 months ago [2], a ton has
been improved since then) but with a couple of twists: 1.
Quantified quality comparison (90-120% of remove.bg, depending on
image category), free for you to check your own images so you can
make an informed choice. 2. Customer-friendly pricing (PAYGO @
1-10% of competitors' subscriptions) with a generous free tier (and
free while in beta). 3. A novel API result format: Delta PNG [3],
which offers excellent latency & bandwidth savings. Especially
useful for mobile apps. 4. Operational transparency: actual volume
& latency metrics public, with more coming soon (all API providers
should be showing this). There's of course more to it than just
price and we see several sources of differentiation in this market:
quality, price, capability, reliability, latency, and goodwill. As
a new entrant we're looking to meet-or-beat the quality bar; beat
on price, capability, reliability and latency; and to build up
goodwill over time. Our goal is to make it a no-brainer for new
accounts to choose us, and to provide the tools and guidance
necessary for existing accounts to make the switch with confidence.
We'd love for you to try it out and to hear your thoughts!
https://pixian.ai [1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601 [2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439405 [3]
https://pixian.ai/api/deltaPng
Author : jacobn
Score : 353 points
Date : 2023-05-24 22:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pixian.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (pixian.ai)
| nathancahill wrote:
| This falls victim to the inability to do microtransactions
| online. I love the philosophy and reasoning for starting yet
| another background removal service, but as someone that uses
| similar tools very sporadically, the $5 minimum for the full-
| resolution is a hefty fee when I'll only use 2-3 of the 250
| images I'm purchasing.
|
| If I could pay for 2-3 images, I'd gladly pay 5x the price per
| image.
|
| Have you considered letting users accumulate a minimum bill over
| time before charging their credit card?
| renonce wrote:
| "We intend to offer a free tier for low-volume users." I would
| expect that users using below a certain amount, like $3,
| probably do not need to pay at all.
| dannyw wrote:
| Or offer a EUR1 euro option that lets you try 10 images.
| matthieurouif wrote:
| Background removal is becoming a commodity but at the same time
| being top quality is an essential block of building quality
| software. We built photoroom and removing background is free, no
| subscription needed https://www.photoroom.com/background-remover
| You can see that we are 2x remove.bg in accuracy
| https://www.velebit.ai/blog/background-removal/
| jacobn wrote:
| Bonjour Matthieu, photoroom is offering precisely the type of
| pricing we're looking to disrupt ;)
|
| Photoroom users: feel free to use https://pixian.ai/comparisons
| to compare the results.
|
| (We haven't done a comparison with them so genuinely don't know
| if they're better or worse)
| micw wrote:
| Accuracy is awesome. Tried with a complex thing: A photo of my
| son sitting on a tree. While others (pixian.ai) remove his legs
| and let a tree branch there instead, photoroom removed
| everything from the photo except the person.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I gave it a shot, but it loads forever after I dragged an image
| in. Up investigation, it sends a POST request (with the image
| likely) but got HTTP 423.
| nadermx wrote:
| I also agree it is becoming a commodity, I even made an open
| source tool few years ago to remove the background from images
| and videos https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover
| skyfine wrote:
| Just tested it and I love the easy method you added for cropping.
| The result was very good too!
| gnicholas wrote:
| I appreciate the free tier with resolution-limited downloads. And
| you've priced the middle tier right, because I wouldn't hesitate
| to drop five bucks even if I didn't know how long it would take
| me to churn through all 250 redemptions.
| hovering_nox wrote:
| >Retention
|
| >Records not associated with an account are deleted or anonymized
| within a year of creation. Image processing records associated
| with an account are retained indefinitely.
|
| >We retain them on your behalf so that you can view and download
| them as you wish, and to provide customer support.
|
| Thank you, but no thank you.
| [deleted]
| jwilk wrote:
| Where did you read that?
|
| https://pixian.ai/remove-image-backgrounds says:
|
| > _Right now, we retain images and results for five days after
| they are uploaded, after which they are permanently deleted.
| Please note that our data retention policies may change over
| time, and this current policy does not bind us in the future,
| or require your affirmative consent to change._
|
| https://pixian.ai/policies/terms says:
|
| > _User Submissions and any associated Results will expire 2
| weeks from the point of upload._
|
| > _The Service may provide users with the option to delete User
| Submissions to have them expire before their normal expiration
| time._
|
| > _Expired User Submissions and any associated Results are
| subject to deletion or retention at the Company 's sole
| discretion._
| hovering_nox wrote:
| On their Privacy Policy under Image Processing Records
|
| https://pixian.ai/policies/privacy
| jrd79 wrote:
| (I'm a dev on the project.) The privacy policy is an old
| and generic one that we use across a bunch of sites. It
| should be updated. Our retention policy on this site is as
| stated on the front page FAQ. After five days, the records
| are deleted.
| dheera wrote:
| I just assume nothing is deleted when sent over an electronic
| medium. Makes life easier with that assumption.
| edu wrote:
| On iOS you can long tap on a subject and then save it as an
| image. Mac OS has a similar feature on right click and Preview :)
| smortaz wrote:
| seems to be fast and accurate. thx will use.
| romain64 wrote:
| The results are very good, and this is not surprising considering
| the company behind the product. What surprises me is why the
| creator of ClippingMagic justifies himself for the creation of
| the tool (PAYGO instead of subscription) and creates a new
| competition when like remove.bg and other competitors they only
| offer subscription for ClippingMagic.
|
| Anyway, it's a good news to have finally a quality tool at low
| price... hoping that once they won the market, they won't
| increase the prices.
| jrd79 wrote:
| (I'm a dev on the project.) We have no plans to jack up prices.
| We see the whole market moving to low-margin cost+ pricing and
| we want to lead rather than follow. If we raised prices later,
| we'd only expose ourselves to being disrupted in the way that
| we are hoping to disrupt right now. Low margin plays are all
| about operational efficiencies, so that we can turn a profit at
| price points that other providers cannot. That is our laser
| focus, which is why our processing time is so quick.
|
| Clipping Magic is a totally different product. It is editor-
| based with a bunch of post-clip effects and features. The
| editor allows you to fix errors in a way that a single-shot DL-
| based solution simply does not. We don't actually see the
| services as competing with each other, since DL-based solutions
| have taken over the portion of the market where 80-95% success
| rate and some errors are ok, so long as it is fast and cheap.
| koliber wrote:
| I recently found out that on MacOS, the Preview app can do image
| background removal it's pretty good at it too!
| davidcollantes wrote:
| I am interested in this. I haven't found a way. How? Thanks!
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Looks great. the "see it in action" might look better with a
| checkerboard transparency background instead of white.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Agreed -- it's hard to see the edge detection between the
| sleeve and the sand. From what I can tell, it looks pretty
| good!
| peter-m80 wrote:
| I tried with a random photo from my mobile phone, it complains
| that the image is too large. This is bad UX to me. The webapp
| could resize it for me
| jacobn wrote:
| Most images have excessive margins around the foreground. By
| allowing you to crop it instead of just shrinking it you get an
| effectively higher resolution result.
|
| If you don't want to manually crop it, just press "ok".
|
| That said we could probably improve the messaging in that
| dialog, thanks!
| tpowell wrote:
| I will give this a try, but I've been happy to shell out for a
| few credits on remove.bg when intricate hair strands were
| involved [in isolating portraits]. Whatever they do just works.
| jacobn wrote:
| remove.bg is great, and they handle hair really well. But so do
| we! Give us a shot next time ;)
| Udo wrote:
| I like this, tried it out and it performed pretty well. I signed
| up. It says in the pricing section that 2Mpx images are free,
| although my test image was larger than that.
|
| My account at Cedar Lake Ventures does not link back to Pixian,
| and there doesn't seem to be any way to enter payment information
| on either site.
|
| So, where and how exactly do I pay?
| jrd79 wrote:
| (I'm a dev on the project.) It is free while in beta. We've not
| implemented pricing yet, as we are a small team and just
| shipped the latest version of the model.
| [deleted]
| seper8 wrote:
| You can do this yourself for free, using the U2NET model...
| Either client-side or server side.
|
| https://github.com/xuebinqin/U-2-Net
|
| Pretty trivial thing to implement.
| redox99 wrote:
| For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself
| quite trivially by [...]
| totetsu wrote:
| sending your photos to your iphone, tapping and holding on
| the object, and taping the share option that pops up over the
| foreground item, then choosing save image. then you can send
| that new image with the background removed back to your linux
| system.
|
| How to send and receive image between linux and iphone is
| left as an exercise for the reader.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| I don't think trivial means what you think it means
| seper8 wrote:
| https://github.com/OPHoperHPO/image-background-remove-tool
|
| Open source implementation of this
| eitland wrote:
| Several hundreds or possibly several thousands of lines of
| python code (I just checked main.py and one from a
| subfolder) doesn't sound trivial to me.
|
| That said, I am not negative, only pointing out that at
| least for me (as a admittedly non-native speaker,) trivial
| is not a word I would use to describe it.
| redox99 wrote:
| The animation when you drag a photo is extremely nice
| scotty79 wrote:
| I really like the honest comparison with competitor. At first I
| was confused because I'm so accustomed to the adverts containing
| bogus comparisons.
| prepend wrote:
| This is neat and glad to see more work in this area.
|
| My issue is that it's hard to buy credits for something specific
| like this, especially when my phone does it for free. So it's
| tough to compete with Apple.
|
| I hope more work in this area gets us closer to local ai that can
| do this without needing a service as I would gladly pay $10 one
| time (or sponsor an oss dev) to be able to do this for the rest
| of my life.
|
| I've really enjoyed stablediffusion run locally. Even on my
| crappy machine, it's nice to be able to not worry about credits
| and there's no ticking clock impacting my exploration.
| theNJR wrote:
| This.
|
| I understand why these are SaaS offerings from a business POV,
| but don't understand why there aren't more options to run
| locally. Are gaming GPUs like a 3080 not powerful enough?
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| > Are gaming GPUs like a 3080 not powerful enough?
|
| It really depends on the model. Just cherry-picking memory as
| a capacity dimension first: The SAM model from Meta ships at
| around 2.4GB w/ 360 million parameters. That trained model
| fits just fine on a 12GB 3080 Ti. How fast it can compute
| predictions on a single 3080 Ti is a different story, in the
| case of SAM it does well, but this ultimately depends on how
| complex the given model is (not the only variable, but a big
| one).
|
| > don't understand why there aren't more options to run
| locally
|
| I think it's likely that you haven't been looking in the
| right places for local solutions. The deep learning space is
| very well represented in open source at the moment across a
| wide set of verticals: language models, computer vision,
| speech recognition, voice synthesis, etc. You don't always
| get the white glove UX that SaaS sometimes can offer, but
| thats true of much of the rest of the OSS world as well.
|
| EDIT: Wanted to note that I use both a 3080 Ti and my M2 Max
| for a variety of DL tasks (both for training and inference).
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| SaaS makes more money and fits into the 4HourWorkWeek "make
| recurring revenue from people" playbook.
|
| Building a thing and selling it seems like it will make less
| money to me.
|
| It's funny that on a larger scale I used to hate enterprise
| software. It took a year to install and had to be patched and
| run servers and stuff. But you paid a big amount and then
| like 10-20%/year for maintenance and that's it. So many
| things are saas and cost $500-100+/user/year and it's not
| just the cost but it's the planning and gatekeeping. Making
| it available to more users can be expensive. I kind miss the
| simplicity of budgeting $1M and being done. Now each year
| it's figuring out who really needs it and cleaning up expired
| accounts and being stingy on if another team can use it or
| not.
|
| One of my favorite things was how easy it was to scale and
| share with new users.
| jrd79 wrote:
| (I'm a dev on the project.) We've not decided on the exact term
| of the credits, but they will be long-lasting, so you can pay
| $5 for 250 images and use that over the course of a few years.
| We'd make them non-expiring, but that creates an unbounded
| liability.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Generally things with "Lifetime Guarantee" means "Lifetime of
| the company" or even "Lifetime of the specified product
| line/family/version" if you look at the fine print.
| prepend wrote:
| Thanks. I appreciate unexpiring credits and think that's a
| super reasonable price.
|
| Again, thanks for your work. I don't want to criticize and am
| glad you built this. I just like to voice this opinion in
| case it helps, in any small way, to increase the odds of more
| local software.
| ghaff wrote:
| Something like that seems eminently reasonable. Low dollar
| amount for enough uses that I don't need to think too much
| every time I press the execute button. Reasonable expiration
| window. No subscription which I _generally_ prefer. (Though I
| 'd note that Photoshop is getting very close to doing this
| sort of thing and a Photoshop + Lightroom subscription is
| actually pretty reasonable--$20/mo--if you use them a lot.
| That's the sort of price point that a lot of standalone
| generative AI tools are going to be up against.)
| jacob019 wrote:
| I rather like the fremium model, where basic use is free and
| you pay for the API or high-res. 2MP isn't bad, that's about
| 1400x1400, but I'd like to see 1500 ot 2000, personally. I
| think they'll have a tough time transitioning to paid-only.
|
| Credits are annoying, but no one has really cracked
| micropayments--it's too expensive to take $1 payments.
|
| I like how replicate does it, just take a card and bill for
| usage, then you can decide to just comp it or defer the charges
| when usage is low.
|
| Going local is fun and practical for hobby use, but for
| business use an API makes more sense. Let someone else deal
| with hardware.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| There is also remove.bg
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Kinda related:
|
| What's the best free web-based AI inpainting tool?
|
| (...or pixian will also offer this functionality?)
| elramon wrote:
| [dead]
| akbarnur wrote:
| I love the tool. Would you be able to add background blending
| feature? Basically the use case I thinking of replacing the
| background by merging the two photos, where main photo is subject
| and the secondary photo is background. Doing blending in
| Photoshop is such a pain.
| msantos wrote:
| My 10+ years old poor-man's image background removal through
| ImageMagick alone
|
| https://gist.github.com/mvsantos/5554663
|
| It does a good enough job for studio photography with clear
| subjects and plain backgrounds. But fails miserably if the
| background is multicolour and/or contain too many objects.
| hoherd wrote:
| Got some example images you have processed?
| phonescreen_man wrote:
| Someone asked that 6 years ago and they still waiting for a
| reply
| hoherd wrote:
| thatsthejoke.gif
| [deleted]
| villgax wrote:
| macOS does this natively. There's models that can run in the
| browser literally so any premise on discounting doesn't exactly
| pan out lol
| jrd79 wrote:
| (I'm a dev.) Not everyone has macOS, and running a DL model in
| your browser is not exactly mainstream. Which is why segment
| leader remove.bg gets an estimated 35M in monthly organic
| traffic. Also, we believe our results are significantly better
| than those offered by the open-source models we've seen.
| villgax wrote:
| I'm talking about lightweight ONNX models which for this task
| is more than enough.
| marcopicentini wrote:
| Would be great to have a flag to perform this chain:
|
| - Remove background
|
| - Replace background with white
|
| - Upscale image to 1000px
| jacobn wrote:
| The API allows you to do that - just set the relevant
| parameters.
|
| https://pixian.ai/api#remove-background
| Blammar wrote:
| The problem I have with these is that they do 98% of the removal
| well, but flub the last 2%. This has been the case with every one
| of the online and app flavors I have used (note I refuse to
| subscribe to Adobe.)
|
| My use case is mineral photos, as it turns out. And I would be
| very surprised if the AI had been trained on these. The sad thing
| is -- mineral photo backgrounds tend to be very simple and
| smoothly-varying. Should be a slam dunk. Ah well.
|
| A one-shot background remover doesn't give you the opportunity to
| interact with it and suggest that it got things wrong here and
| there.
|
| Yes, I tried one of my mineral photos, and the app made several
| errors that it shouldn't have, as the foreground was clearly
| distinct from the background.
|
| I don't know if I'm allowed to post a photo link, but here it is:
| https://imgur.com/a/V9H1pRH .
| throwaway290 wrote:
| iOS photos has this built-in AI thing where you double tap a
| photo and it separates the subject into a png with alpha. Imgur
| made available only a very low res version of your shot but
| still this is what I got, seems pretty good actually:
| https://wormhole.app/mbrY3#ab0qbAz7p26SYR0CEONDpQ
|
| (also, cool shot!)
| jrd79 wrote:
| (I'm a dev on the project.) We have another background-removal
| service, ClippingMagic.com, that is built around an editor to
| let you fix the errors in the automatic result. You may want to
| give it a try for your mineral photos.
| joshvm wrote:
| Have you tried Segment Anything from Meta? There are a bunch of
| click guided segmentation models out there.
|
| https://segment-anything.com/demo#
|
| It worked fine on your example with a couple of clicks.
| thangngoc89 wrote:
| As someone who is actively working on using SAM, I would say
| that it leaves a weird border (2-5 pixels wide) of the cut
| out object so depending on the tasks, it may or may not be
| suitable. And in the demo, the server returned a way better
| image embedding than the open source one from Vit_h. There
| are a lot of issues on github talking about this. So take
| what you see on the demo page with a grain of salt.
| avereveard wrote:
| Smooth background is likely worse because it carries not much
| background semantic. A wood table might do better there. Anyway
| the white box approach does so much more to item display
| photos, including all around soft lighting, background removal
| ai still are quite a way from those.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If you don't mind a bit of manual effort, Photopea's magic cut
| is pretty good for this kind of scenario. It is similar to the
| AI tools except you can designate what to lose or keep by
| highlighting sections.
|
| https://www.photopea.com/tuts/magic-cut-remove-image-backgro...
| throwoutway wrote:
| For a moment, I thought this was a 'watermark removal'. Still
| very cool though
| kookamamie wrote:
| The main challenge and deficiency with this and other services
| like this is that they assume some content type to be foreground
| - here it is likely "portrait" style people - it's hard to say as
| this information isn't included in the UX. Does it handle other
| foregrounds, such as cars? Who knows.
|
| A better solution is to have controls, at least in optional
| manner, which the user can use to scribble examples of the
| foreground(s) and backgrounds.
| jacobn wrote:
| Absolutely, that was our original take on
| https://clippingmagic.com where the editor lets you easily make
| changes to the result.
|
| But almost all API users and most regular users just want a
| result and to not have to futz with it, hence this offering.
| avereveard wrote:
| Love it. It also provide highres output out of the box. 100% I
| will be a customer, albeit my yearly needs are in single digit
| range.
| high_priest wrote:
| Adding it to HomeScreen as a WebApp on Android, creates a link
| without a logo. Could you make it appear like other WebApps, like
| Squoosh?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I've tried lots of free services of background removal, this is
| definitely one of the best one and it's fast. Thanks for the
| tool.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| There's some mention that this can be self-hosted, but it's not
| that easy.
|
| Even a pre-trained model and self-hosted API like RemBG[0]
| performs a lot worse than this "pixian" service does.
|
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/KenjieDec/RemBG [0]
|
| All in all, I'd say they put a LOT of effort into scaling (it's
| FAST) and the models (they're extremely accurate).
| hackernewds wrote:
| you have conflict of interest with them? very generous review
| tmikaeld wrote:
| Not at all affiliated. I have used these kind of APIs for
| ecommerce for about +15 years and are always looking for the
| best quality/cost ratio and this one really impressed.
| markdown wrote:
| Doesn't seem to accept .heic photos, which is really odd given
| that the majority of new photos in the US are probably created in
| that format.
| ullarah wrote:
| The comparisons show a legend but the keys are all the same
| colour?
|
| Is that intentional?
| jacobn wrote:
| Ah, it's not, will fix, thanks for pointing that out!
| thot_experiment wrote:
| If anyone is already running auto1111, or simply uninterested in
| paying, there's an addon that does this very well available here
| https://github.com/KutsuyaYuki/ABG_extension, additionally I've
| had very good results using the masks generated by Facebook's
| SAM, which is also available as an addon here
| https://github.com/continue-revolution/sd-webui-segment-anyt...
|
| auto1111 has a one click installer and these extensions can be
| installed by going to the "extensions" tab and pasting the github
| URL into the "install from URL" box. auto1111 available here
| https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
| yreg wrote:
| I have set up auto1111 just as a hobby to make art (if it's
| okay to call it that) for myself.
|
| Surprisingly (?) my convoluted setup is slowly becoming this
| actually useful toolkit for various tasks I sometimes need to
| do.
| dibrale wrote:
| I made a UI for Meta's SAM that works very well for background
| removal: https://github.com/dibrale/samist
|
| It runs from a python script.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Great tool!
|
| Some explanations on the differences of these models would be
| nice for a noob.
| dibrale wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the difference between the SAM
| models is just a parameter number versus accuracy tradeoff.
| I have the parameter numbers listed under 'Installation',
| but the relative quality of the models would be task-
| dependent and subjective.
|
| I would think that part of the motivation for releasing the
| smaller models in addition to the larger ones would be use
| in video image segmentation and mobile filters. The smaller
| models might actually be more fit for purpose with regard
| with regard to those applications than the biggest one.
| However, I'd reccommend the biggest model (vit_h) for
| desktop or laptop image processing.
| jacob019 wrote:
| Which model are you using? There are a bunch of different
| background removal models, many with configuration options, but
| most of the services only provide one and without configuration.
| I need to remove backgrounds for my ecommerce business, and the
| results vary widely between models and confuguring alpha-matting
| can make a difference too. So I've been developing a tool that
| has all the models in one place, along with upcaling, enhancing,
| and inpainting models. It spins up Vultr GPU instances on demand
| but that's kind of slow so I'm also hitting API's, like
| replicate, huggingface, and runpod. I will integrate yours too.
|
| For background removal, I get good results with isnet-general-use
| and u2net, available through rembg or huggingface. I've also been
| getting decent results with DIS-v1 on replicate.
|
| The results vary so widely, especially if there are blurry or
| light areas, it's necessary to have options. It can also be very
| helpful to do preprocessing image enhancement, to remove blur or
| upscale, prior to the background removal. I'm sure you could even
| take the alpha mask from the enhanced image and use it on the
| original image, to help in cases where the source image has
| issues.
|
| There also needs to exist a service for interactive background
| removal, via automatic and/or interactive segmenting. Sometimes
| the models need a little help, and I think it's rediculous that I
| still have to trace paths when the models fail.
|
| Anyway, I love the idea and pricing model, will def try it out,
| but I'd like to see more details on the models being used, and
| I'd like to see more options and configuration.
|
| This looks like a fun startup, I've thought of doing something
| similar. There's a lot of room to grow with other AI image
| manipulation models, not just for background removal. Shoot me an
| email if you would like to discuss.
| jacobn wrote:
| We'll likely add complementary AI models (e.g. super-
| resolution, stable diffusion, etc), with the broad bet being
| that businesses definitely don't want to run their own service,
| and would prefer off-the-shelf to custom models (for which
| there's a bunch of hosting options).
|
| For background removal specifically, all models will inevitably
| have some failure rate. https://clippingmagic.com is the only
| one with a serious editor that enables you to get exactly the
| result you want on any image (it's our legacy service with
| "old-school" SaaS pricing).
| jacob019 wrote:
| I signed up and used it via API. Decent results and FAST!
| I'll keep using it via API. Looking forward to seeing what
| else you guys come up with. Thanks!
|
| I think that broad bet is a good one. Simple API endpoints
| with a good selection of curated models will certainly be a
| hit. There are lots of options for hosting, and quite a few
| API providers, but they're all some combination of overly
| complicated, slow, brittle, or functionally limited.
| bambax wrote:
| Ok; two things:
|
| 1. For "objects" and "artwork" it says that quality is above 100%
| (108% and 119% respectively), which is weird and doesn't inspire
| confidence? It's also unclear generally what those percentages
| mean.
|
| 2. When trying this from work it says "Unable to connect to the
| worker. Is your firewall or proxy blocking WebSockets?" -- it's
| possible that the firewall is the culprit but there should be a
| workaround? (All methods give the same result, drag'n drop,
| ctrl+v, or picking from the explorer).
| wes-k wrote:
| You can click through to see the report. Above 100% means they
| performed better than the competition, not they handled every
| picture well.
|
| > Pixian.AI had 241 images that were rated good, or not rated
| and identical. That's 87.0% of your 277 images.
|
| > The competitor had 201 images that were rated good, or not
| rated and identical. That's 72.6% of your 277 images.
|
| > Pixian.AI achieved 241 / 201 = 119.9% of the competitor's
| performance
|
| > The report is based on a set of user-provided images. We then
| reviewed the services' respective results separately and rated
| them as either good or bad. The comparison was done in a blind
| manner, without labels indicating which result was Pixian.AI's
| and which was the competitor's. We then tallied up the results
| and produced this report.
|
| https://pixian.ai/comparisons/cwsslt8d78zl7vq/share/5e51cd3d...
| mmastrac wrote:
| It's not a great way to compare, but a clearer presentation
| would state "100%" for pixian.ai and < 100% for the
| competitor.
| skilled wrote:
| Without annoying subscriptions "yet". The "free while in beta"
| statement and the title of this submission contradict themselves.
|
| I'm also curious what exactly is your goal with this project? At
| the very least there are 20 or more businesses that do the exact
| same thing. I think marketing yourself in this space is going to
| be an absolute nightmare unless you have a massive marketing
| budget to game Google.
|
| If you want goodwill then you'll need to cough up 10 removals per
| day for free users and then focus on business customers. But I
| don't think you'll be able to keep up because open-source already
| offers this service and it won't be long before an enterprise
| solution pops up on GitHub too.
| jacobn wrote:
| We have published our intended pricing (
| https://pixian.ai/#pricing ), which is pay-as-you-go "s3-style"
| pricing, not subscription based.
|
| Yes, there's a lot more than 20 competitors. Our goal is to hit
| an attractive point on the quality-price pareto frontier that
| they just can't match.
|
| That said, marketing will definitely be a challenge ;)
| mabbo wrote:
| > Why are these prices so much lower than the competition?
|
| > Their margin is our opportunity.
|
| A bit off topic but is that quote originally from Jeff Bezos, or
| did he just make it more famous?
|
| Anytime I hear it, I immediately presume the person saying it
| worked at Amazon. Because I say it, and I did too.
| jacobn wrote:
| We got it from Bezos, but haven't worked at Amazon though both
| know people there and use AWS extensively (e.g. pixian.ai is
| hosted there).
| peyloride wrote:
| Tried couple of pics, it's way better than other services and
| pricing of it seems really good! Thanks for the app!
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Bookmarked, will use.
|
| If I can upvote twice, I would.
|
| >Philosophy >While AI is rapidly transforming the way we as a
| society do business, AI itself is changing even faster. What was
| >cutting edge only a few years ago is now rapidly becoming
| commoditized.
|
| >We choose to accept and accelerate this reality.
|
| >We therefore see ourselves less as a tech startup, and more as
| an outsourced MLOps extension to your engineering team. >Our goal
| is to be more 'S3' and less 'Adobe' for state-of-the-art AI image
| processing.
|
| Well done and well said.
|
| Wish many hearths won
| jacobn wrote:
| Thank you!
| WizardClickBoy wrote:
| How does it compare to Command+Shift+K in Preview on Mac OS?
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| You can also right-click -> actions -> remove background on
| recent (not entirely sure when it was added) Mac OS versions
| villgax wrote:
| Exactly & doing it in browser is also not that far fetched
| hackernewds wrote:
| pretty good! will use it to generate WhatsApp stickers. perhaps
| you could use Enterprise sales as a way to subsidize consumers
| with 1 use/year needs? :)
| eitland wrote:
| Problem is there are so many cheap companies out there it seems
| you can easily run yourself into a "sybil resource exhaustion
| attack" by employees working their way around the "free for
| consumers paid for businesses" rule.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Is something with this functionality available as a Gimp plugin?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Nice work if you can get it, but fine-grained "services" like
| this feel dead in the water, since you're one motivated developer
| away from e.g. GIMP/Krita plugin, no?
| lucianfelix wrote:
| https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/remove-backgroun...
| does it for free. You do have to create a free acount in order to
| download the image though.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| So does the OP (just did it!) but you pay for higher res
| renonce wrote:
| Does that work in batch so I can upload, like, 1000 photos at a
| time? That's what I expect from an API.
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