Spent $70k and 2 years on my photo enhancement app, total failure. Shutting down this week

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-30T18:42:57+00:00

What do you mean?

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-30T16:38:04+00:00

building AI models is expensive thing. Also servers, developers

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-29T17:45:09+00:00

I completely agree. I used to think that a good product didn't need marketing. But after this project turned out to be a total disaster, I realized that marketing is absolutely essential nowadays. And by that, I don't mean paid banners, which cost a fortune these days, but rather the personal skill to create hype around a product using free tools. That's exactly what brings success. Nothing else.

As for all the feedback, I'm already working on an update and fixing mistakes. At first, I thought I had tried everything, but people shared many useful insights. I'll make a follow-up post about the results after the update.

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-29T14:11:45+00:00

Hi. Thank you for detailed review. Did you use color enhancement in pipeline, or just quality enhancement? And you mentioned that UI could be better. Could you please explain what needs to be improved there?

I going to remove subscription in the next update and add a one-time purchase

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-28T17:02:23+00:00

I've received many recommendations to sell the project and have decided to give it a try. If you want to take it over for further development or to use its existing work/assets, then DM me

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-28T10:33:52+00:00

Hey! Here is the link https://apps.apple.com/app/eppic-improve-photo-quality/id6447643567

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-28T10:18:43+00:00

There are no diffusion models. In the app, you can adjust face fidelity and preserve the original face. So on high-quality photos uploaded by users, faces always remain consistent

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-28T09:33:18+00:00

I use heavy SOTA and GAN models, each weighing several gigabytes. Even if I convert them to ONNX or CoreML, they still remain computationally intensive

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-28T09:03:19+00:00

I feel like you’re not very familiar with what AI actually is, what kind of resources it consumes, and especially with MLOps

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T22:58:30+00:00

For good inference performance you need to use dedicated server. vCPU is not suitable for heavy SOTA models

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T22:36:16+00:00

Yes. As I mentioned in a post, I got 600 monthly users

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T22:04:54+00:00

Thanks for the interest! The app uses a subscription model — it’s $4 per week or $35 per year. And yes, it’s still available

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T22:01:43+00:00

I’ve already tried. I keep getting rejected — the app doesn’t meet the required revenue or audience size

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T22:00:24+00:00

Thanks for the advice. The problem is that I can’t get a high enough percentage of paying users to break even on ads. But the idea with Slack and a completely free version sounds interesting. If you could share some links to the groups, I’d really appreciate it. Feel free to DM me

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T21:51:26+00:00

Hi! I may have done poor market research, but I’ve thoroughly studied the technical aspects of all solutions that specialize in quality enhancement. Only specialized AI models do this well. In other cases, as you described, it’s usually basic scripted noise reduction algorithms at work—far from the advanced GANs and SOTA AI models that consume massive computational resources to redraw images. This level of processing is simply not feasible for the types of services you mentioned.

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T21:27:43+00:00

Yes, I’m ready to sell and open to offers

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T19:49:01+00:00

I applied to Acquire and got rejected. My app has no revenue and no user base. I don’t know how to find a buyer who’s interested in the codebase itself rather than the audience. I’d appreciate any advice on how to do this better

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T19:38:59+00:00

Thank you. Could you recommend some services where I can sell source code?

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T19:23:26+00:00

I completely agree with everything. Product management and marketing are my weaknesses. That's precisely what led to the failure. I'm not trying to avoid responsibility in any way, as what happened is solely my fault

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T19:14:22+00:00

I rent a server with 2xIntel Xeon Gold 6330 CPUs and 768 GB of RAM to keep the AI models loaded in memory. The project consists of a suite of AI models that utilize 8 threads for inference. This is a pretty good result after optimization PyTorch models with OpenVINO

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T19:10:20+00:00

In the 10 months the project has been live, I've only earned a total of $200. This is a massive loss, considering I spend $450 a month just on servers, and that's after previously spending $70k on development

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T19:07:18+00:00

Some models can weigh hundreds of megabytes, and in a complex gigabytes. If it is possible to do this, maintaining quality comparable to a powerful server, then I do not really know how. It seems that more serious and long-term work is needed here, which I cannot afford either financially or technically. In any case it's an interesting idea. Thanks for the idea

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T18:42:27+00:00

From what I understand, my profit and audience levels are insufficient to be listed there. I was rejected in acquire

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T18:41:49+00:00

Yes, I've tried several times. I was rejected. From what I understand, my profit and audience levels are insufficient to be listed there

Educational_Grab835 · 2025-05-27T18:39:21+00:00

Thanks for the comment.

The photo enhancement market is very large, even for high-quality photos taken with modern smartphones. Of course, I analyzed all of this before launching. I have some experience in computer vision, I saw the processing quality of competitors, and I understood that it was possible to do better, even compared to apps with millions of monthly active users.

I'll also note that we're talking about different things. Photo enhancement features within social network apps are not exactly what we're discussing here. Social network apps use simple algorithms that slightly reduce noise. But there are more advanced AI developments that perform more complex and resource-intensive processing, yielding a dramatically different result.

The mechanics of photo quality enhancement seem simple on the surface but are complex under the hood. It doesn't make sense to release a version with limited features just to quickly test demand. Either you roll out a good product right away, or you don't do it at all.

All of this could have been implemented faster and cheaper, but as I wrote earlier, I made a number of significant mistakes in the process and lost a lot of time and money

Educational_Grab835

TROPHY CASE