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!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439405 [3] https://pixian.ai/api/deltaPng