An independent background remover, built for people who edit images every day rather than once a month.
Cutola is a background remover with enough of an editor attached to finish the image. You upload a photo, the background comes off, and you can put the subject on a colour, a gradient, a scene or your own backdrop — then adjust, upscale, resize or convert it without opening anything else.
It runs entirely in a browser. There is nothing to install, and it works the same on a phone as on a desktop.
The background removal itself has been a solved problem for a few years. What has not been solved is the pricing around it. A lot of tools give you a low-resolution preview for free and put the actual file behind a subscription, which is fine if you edit one image a month and expensive if you edit forty.
So the design constraint here was simple: the free tier has to be genuinely usable — full resolution, no watermark — and paying should be per image rather than per month if that is what suits you. Credits start at $2 for 10, and nothing requires a subscription.
Background removal uses BiRefNet, a segmentation model chosen specifically because it does alpha matting properly — the boundary pixels around hair and fur get partial transparency instead of a hard cut. That is the difference between a cutout that survives a dark background and one that shows a pale fringe.
Upscaling uses Real-ESRGAN. Resizing, conversion and compression are ordinary image operations and cost nothing, because charging credits for a resize would be silly.
Model inference for background removal runs on GPU infrastructure operated by Replicate; the rest of the pipeline is ours. The privacy policy sets out exactly who touches your files and for how long.
It is not a design suite. There are no templates, no layouts and no text-to-image generation, and none of those are planned as headline features. If you want a product staged in a scene that was never photographed, other tools do that and do it well.
It does not process video. It does not do sky replacement, virtual staging or passport-photo presets. There is no desktop app, no Photoshop plugin, and the API is still in development rather than live.
Saying so plainly seems better than letting you find out after signing up.
The API is the most-requested thing and the next significant piece of work; the early-access list is what is shaping its design and pricing. Beyond that, the priorities come from what people actually ask for.
If something is missing that would make this useful to you, [email protected] reaches a real inbox.