Piknova is free
There is no paid plan, no trial, and no card anywhere in the flow. Every image tool on this site is free and unlimited, and you do not need an account to use one.
We used to sell a Pro tier here. It charged for a bigger merged export and a commercial-use licence, which meant selling you a better copy of an image you had already made, out of a file we never received. That was a worse product wearing a price tag, so it is gone.
What you pay
What that gets you
- Every tool on the site, not a subset
- Unlimited exports, with no daily cap and no queue
- Full resolution downloads, never a scaled-down free version
- No watermark on anything, at any size
- No account needed to use a tool or to download what it makes
- Nothing uploaded: the work runs in your browser, on your machine
Who pays for it
Not you.
It never was.
Somebody has to, though
Piknova runs on about $70 a month, and it comes out of my own pocket. No investors, no paywall, and no account needed to use any of it.
- $Hosting and bandwidth for every page and every tool
- $The database behind ratings and feedback
- $The domain, renewed once a year like clockwork
So if a tool here saved you twenty minutes, or saved you a subscription somewhere else, you can chip in for a coffee. You pick the amount, and the smallest one is genuinely fine. Most people will not chip in at all, which is fine too, and is how free tools are supposed to work.
One tap, no account, nothing to cancel later. Card, Apple Pay or PayPal.
What a coffee does not buy you
Nothing, deliberately. This is the part most free tools get wrong: they take the donation and then start building the thing the donation was supposed to prevent. A coffee here is a thank-you, not a purchase, and you keep exactly what you already had.
- No Pro badge, no supporter tier, no members-only tools
- Nothing unlocks, because nothing was locked
- No subscription unless you deliberately pick the monthly option
- No mailing list, and no follow-up asking for more
What it does do is boring and real: it pays a bill, and it is the only signal I get that any of this was worth building. Both of those keep the tools free for the people who cannot pay for them, which is most of you, which is the point.
How is it free?
Because almost none of it runs on our hardware. Splitting, merging, converting, compressing, resizing, annotating and even background removal all happen inside your browser, on your own machine. One more person compressing one more photo costs us nothing, so there is nothing to meter and no reason to put a login in front of a download.
The $70 a month is what is left over: the pages have to be served from somewhere, and the ratings and feedback have to be stored somewhere. That bill is flat, which is why one more visitor is genuinely free and why none of this depends on anybody donating.
If a tool ever ships that genuinely costs money every time someone runs it, a paid tier will come back for that tool and it will say exactly what it is paying for. It will not be resolution, format, a watermark, or a daily count, because those cost nothing to give away and they are the whole product.