GenPic

An AI portrait SaaS, finished, tested and run in production, released after it failed commercially. Laravel 11 · Livewire 3 · Filament 3 · Stripe · fal.ai.

Leer en español

What it was, and what happened

GenPic took a photo of you, your family or your friends and turned it into a painted portrait: Renaissance oil, ukiyo-e, anime, a 1920s studio shot, a LinkedIn headshot… 73 styles in nine categories. You uploaded a photo, picked a style, saw a watermarked preview in under a minute, and paid only if you wanted the clean file.

It ran at genpic.com from March to October 2026, in five languages, taking real payments through Stripe with EU VAT handled. People generated plenty of free previews. Nobody bought one. Zero sales. Sign-ups and checkout were closed in September 2026, and in October the app was switched off; genpic.com now only hosts a short farewell page.

The code, though, was finished, tested and running in production, and binning it seemed a waste. So here it is, MIT-licensed. If you're building anything with AI image generation, paid downloads or a multilingual Laravel site, there's probably something here you can take.

The full story of the closure, in Spanish, is on the Color Vivo blog: GenPic cierra sin una sola venta y libera su código con licencia MIT.

Screenshots

Style page: drag to compare the photo and the portrait	Gallery: 36 before/after pairs
Landing pages: ten of them, each with its own layout	Admin: revenue, conversion and AI cost (the zeros are real; the admin panel is in Spanish)
AI providers: fallback chain, cooldowns and cost per image	Styles: translated labels and the prompts behind each one

Mobile: home and style page on a phone.

More screenshots

Style catalog, filterable by category	Another style page
Upload (Spanish UI)	Face detection, in the browser, before anything is sent (Spanish UI)
Professional photos landing	Valentine's Day landing
Spanish (the default language)	French
Recovering past portraits by email	404 page (error pages only came in Spanish)
Closed mode: how the site said goodbye	/create answering 410 in closed mode (Spanish only)
Admin: styles	Admin: one log line per AI call, with its cost
Admin: gallery examples	Admin: products
Mobile gallery	Mobile closing page

Full-page captures: home and family photos landing.

What's inside worth taking

• The full funnel: upload → face detection → moderation → AI job → polling → watermarked preview → email capture → Stripe Checkout → signed-URL delivery → automatic file purge.
• Multi-provider AI with fallback. fal.ai, OpenRouter, Novita and Evolink behind one interface, with per-provider cooldowns, a daily budget that reorders the chain cheapest-first, and the cost of every call logged.
• Stripe done properly: Checkout with Stripe Tax for EU VAT (OSS), signature-checked idempotent webhooks, and a reconciliation command every five minutes for webhooks that never arrive.
• Moderation that costs nothing per image: a Hugging Face NSFW classifier runs before any paid generation, with IP bans in Redis backed by the database.
• Five languages with translated slugs (/fotos-de-familia, /en/family-photos, /fr/photos-de-famille…) and correct hreflang. Few sites get this right.
• Filament admin with nine metric widgets, a private image viewer, GDPR anonymization, email campaigns with opt-out and a system health page.
• A written design system (docs/design.md) applied to ten landing pages, each with a different structure.
• Privacy by default: self-hosted fonts, no accounts or passwords for buyers, signed URLs for every file, and the original photo is never sent back to the browser.
• 178 tests on in-memory SQLite, run in CI on every push.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/dcarrero/genpic.git
cd genpic
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d --build        # first run: dependencies, assets, migrations and seed
docker compose exec app php artisan key:generate

Open http://localhost:8101. Emails land in Mailpit at http://localhost:8025.

That gets you the whole site with its 73 styles and the gallery. To log into the admin, generate portraits or try the checkout without Stripe, follow docs/INSTALL.md, which also covers installing without Docker, running the tests and the usual problems.

External services and what they cost

Service	Used for	Cost
fal.ai	Main image generation (SeedReam), upscaling	≈ $0.035 per image
OpenRouter	Fallback generation	≈ $0.04 per image
Novita, Evolink	Optional extra fallbacks (off by default)	≈ $0.03 per image
Hugging Face	NSFW moderation	The free tier was enough
Stripe	Payments, EU VAT via Stripe Tax	Standard fees plus Stripe Tax
S3-compatible storage	Photos and generated images	Pennies at this scale (production used Wasabi)
SMTP	Transactional email	Any provider
Redis + MariaDB	Queues, cache, data	Your own server

The per-image figures are the estimates in config/image_providers.php, which feed the daily budget. Check current prices before you rely on them.

Before you put this in front of the public

• Rewrite the legal pages. The legal_* keys in lang/*/ui.php hold a privacy policy, terms, cookie policy and legal notice written for a Spanish company, now with placeholder company details. Treat them as a starting point, not legal advice.
• Set APP_URL, COMPANY_NAME and CONTACT_EMAIL.
• Set ADMIN_EMAILS and ADMIN_ALLOWED_IPS. Changing ADMIN_PATH only hides the panel; the IP allowlist is what protects it.
• Your own Stripe keys and webhook secret, with Stripe Tax enabled. An empty STRIPE_SECRET means simulated checkout, which in production means free orders.
• At least one AI provider key with credit, and a sensible DAILY_COST_BUDGET_USD (it reorders providers, it doesn't stop them).
• A private bucket. The app never makes objects public.
• Your prices, in database/seeders/FormatsAndProductsSeeder.php and the pricing_price_* strings in lang/*/ui.php.
• Check the style prompts against your image provider's content policy (docs/ARTISTIC_PROMPTS.md).
• Leave CLOSED_MODE=false (the default).

Production deployment, with atomic releases, cron and Horizon, is covered in docs/DEPLOY.md.

Documentation

Everything is indexed in docs/README.md: installation, configuration, deployment, customizing (styles, languages, AI providers, prices, legal pages), architecture and code conventions.

Code comments and some background documents are in Spanish: the project was built for the Spanish market first.

Status

The service is closed and there is no roadmap. Issues and pull requests are welcome, but there's no promise of maintenance. See CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md.

Author

Built by David Carrero Fernández-Baillo (carrero.es) at Color Vivo.

License

MIT © 2026 David Carrero Fernández-Baillo (carrero.es) and Color Vivo Internet S.L. (colorvivo.com)

The gallery "before" photos come from Unsplash under the Unsplash License (credits). The fonts in public/fonts/ are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.