I built a browser-based pixel-art & animation editor with Vue, Laravel and AI

I'm a solo dev, and for the past few months I've been building Pixanima — a pixel-art and animation editor that runs entirely in the browser, with an optional AI assistant baked in. It just launched, and I wanted to share the parts that were technically interesting: making a general image model output clean pixel art, an atomic credit system, AI inbetweening for animation, and why the whole business model falls out of one architectural fact. What it is Draw pixel art with layers, groups and effects, animate it on a frame timeline with onion-skin, and export to GIF / sprite sheets / PNG — all client-side, no install. On top of that, an AI assistant turns a text prompt into sprites, seamless tiles and palettes, re-poses characters, and generates in-between animation frames. The frontend is Vue 3 driving an HTML canvas; the backend is Laravel 12 (PHP 8.4) . Here's what I learned. Everything runs in the browser — and that decided the business model The entire editor is client-side. Projects live in IndexedDB ; nothing is uploaded. That's great for privacy and speed, but it has a consequence a lot of people miss: you cannot meaningfully gate a client-side feature. If drawing, layers and export all run in the user's browser, any "pro" paywall around them is both unenforceable and, honestly, hostile to a price-sensitive hobbyist community. So I flipped it: the editor is 100% free, forever . The only paid thing is AI — because AI is the only part with a real marginal cost, and it requires a backend (which conveniently also protects the code that costs money to run). More on that below. Making a general model output clean pixel art The naive approach — prompt a diffusion model with "pixel art, 16 colors" — gives you pixel-art-ish mush: anti-aliased edges, hundreds of colors, no real grid. Useless as an actual sprite. The fix is a post-processing pipeline. The model just produces raw input; the "pixel art" is made deterministically afterward with PHP's GD: 1. Generate a norma