What Araluma is
Araluma is a suite of free image tools. Today three are live: a Circle Crop for avatars, an AI Background Remover, and an Image Compressor. Two of them run entirely in your browser; two route a single request through our infrastructure to do work the browser doesn’t yet do as well. No signup, no watermark, no resolution cap.
The site exists because the alternatives, in our experience, get one of three things wrong: they upload everything to a server (whether or not the work needs one), they paywall basic operations, or they bury simple tools under intrusive ads. Araluma tries to do none of those — and we describe the actual data flow honestly rather than claim “100% client-side” when the cloud path is what gives you remove.bg-grade results.
Why we built it
The first version of Araluma launched in 2024 as a single tool — a circle crop for profile pictures — built to scratch a personal itch: the existing options either asked for an account or rendered the image at 256 pixels and offered a “Pro” upgrade for the original resolution. Neither felt acceptable for a one-line operation that every browser has been able to do natively for years.
The site grew organically from there. Each new tool answered a recurring question we kept hitting personally — “how do I shrink this PNG without losing transparency?”, “how do I strip the GPS coordinates from this photo before sharing?”, “how do I make a Discord avatar without installing software?”. The 2026 rebuild is the same project, rewritten on top of modern web standards (Astro, WebAssembly, Canvas API for the browser side; Cloudflare Workers + a small VPS for the two tools where server-side encoders or AI models still beat the browser).
Who it’s for
Araluma is built for anyone who needs to do a small, specific thing to an image and doesn’t want to install software, sign up for an account, or hand their photo to a generic uploader that retains it. The current tools cover three common needs:
- Profile pictures — circle-cropping a photo for Discord, LinkedIn, Slack, Instagram, or any platform that masks avatars to a circle. Runs 100% in your browser. Export as transparent PNG, WebP, AVIF, or JPEG.
- Background removal — pulling a subject out of its background with AI. The default path sends your image once to a Cloudflare Worker that runs the BiRefNet model on Cloudflare’s edge GPUs (same architecture as remove.bg), with the staging copy auto-deleted within one hour. When the cloud is unreachable, the tool transparently falls back to an in-browser model (ISNet via ONNX Runtime + WebAssembly) — no upload at all on the fallback path.
- Image compression — preview/edit runs 100% in the browser via
canvas.toBlob, so the slider stays instant. The final download sends your image once to our compression service (api.araluma.com, running Fastify + sharp + libvips on a VPS in Germany) for sharp-grade encoder quality; the encode result is streamed back and the tenant-isolated cache is content-addressed (not indexed by user). Falls back to the in-browser blob if the service is unreachable.
Common to all three: no upload that we keep, no account, no watermark. The two server-touching tools document exactly what happens to your image, where, and for how long.
Our principles
Honest about the architecture
“Your photos stay on your device” is a marketing line we deliberately don’t use, because it’s not true on every path. The truth is: Circle Crop and the Compress preview never leave your browser, and you can verify that in DevTools’ Network tab. The Compress final download and the default Background Removal path send your image exactly once, to named infrastructure we operate (a Hostinger VPS in Germany and a Cloudflare Worker respectively), do their work, return the result, and either auto-delete or rely on a content-addressed cache that’s not tied to you. We tell you which path you’re on; we don’t pretend the cloud path doesn’t exist.
If you need a hard guarantee that bytes never leave your device for a particular job, two tools cover that today (Circle Crop, Compress preview). The Background Remover offers it through its WebAssembly fallback when you turn off the network.
Free should mean free
Every tool that exists today will stay free. We don’t watermark exports, we don’t cap resolution, we don’t require an account, and we don’t show interstitial ads. A future paid tier (“Pro”) will add capability — batch processing, larger upload sizes, lossless export, higher cloud quotas — but it will not gate anything that’s already shipped.
Truthful copy
What we say a tool does and what the code actually does are the same thing. If the page says “Export as PNG, WebP, or JPEG”, you’ll find all three in the format picker. If the page says “up to 4096 px”, that’s the real cap in code. If a tool’s default path is cloud-routed, the page says so — not “all-in-browser” with an asterisk. We have an internal rule that copy and code ship in the same commit, exactly so this never drifts.
Accessibility from the start
Every page passes WCAG 2.2 AA contrast in both light and dark themes. Every interactive element is reachable by keyboard, has a visible focus ring, and has a minimum 24 × 24 CSS-pixel touch target. Screen-reader landmarks (header, main, footer, nav) are in place. The site is built so that the experience for someone using a screen reader, a keyboard, or a small phone is not noticeably worse than for someone with a high-end desktop.
No tracking by default
The site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics for aggregate page-view counts. There are no tracking cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party analytics scripts. The full data flow — including the cloud paths for Background Removal and Compress download — is described in the privacy policy.
How we stay free
Araluma’s static site runs on Cloudflare Pages’ free tier, and the two browser-only tools (Circle Crop, Compress preview) cost us essentially nothing per use because the work happens on your machine.
The two server-touching tools have a small but real cost:
- Background Removal runs on Cloudflare’s
cf.image.segment(free for the first 5,000 transformations per month — our typical month sits well below that), an R2 bucket holding a few MB at any time, a Worker doing tens of requests per day, and a KV namespace for rate-limiting. All on Cloudflare’s free tier today. - Compress download runs on a small Hostinger VPS (KVM 2, ~$10/month) shared across two tenants, returning sharp-grade encodes to thousands of requests per day. The cache hit ratio amortizes most of the work.
As traffic grows, we plan to fund continued development with two layers, in this order:
- One discreet ad below the tool, served by Google AdSense on tool pages only. The home page, satellite pages, and legal pages remain ad-free. This is the standard pattern competitors like iLoveIMG, TinyPNG, and Pixlr use, and it’s what funds free tools at scale on the open web.
- An optional Pro tier ($4/month or $19 lifetime) processed through Lemon Squeezy, unlocking ad-free use, batch processing, higher cloud quotas, and a few power-user features. Aimed at people who use the tools daily and want to support the project. Free use stays free.
The AdSense layer is live as of the 2026 cutover. Pro is planned for after sustained traffic.
How to reach us
For questions, feedback, or bug reports, email support@araluma.com. We read every message and try to respond within five business days.
For privacy-related requests, see the privacy policy. For a technical look under the hood, see how it works.