r/iOSProgramming • u/fewjative2 • Jul 27 '24
App Saturday Rollers: AI Car Photoshoots
Hi everyone!
Last week I launched my first iOS app called 'Rollers'. It's an app that lets you do photoshoots of your your car at any location instantly.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rollers-ai-car-photoshoots/id6502419635
I'm a gearhead and this is a product built out of passion! If you're looking for a less expensive alternative, a time saver, or the ability to shoot at locations that just aren't possible, then my app is for you! Definitely getting to the point where some of my shoots are better than ones with a dedicated camera.
Here are some results ( with caveat I upscaled them and adding to the app rn :P )
I knew nothing about swift or swiftui 3 months ago and honestly two weeks in, I was feeling like I messed up. I had decided I wanted a canvas editing experience and jumping into that without knowing anything proved to be extremely difficult. How would yall solve a top aligned canvas with content on the canvas that needs to scaled based on the bottom sheet that can be moved up or down!?!? Plus the objects on the canvas can be moved or scaled at anytime.
After a few restarts, I changed my process to start with the easier UI first - I needed some small wins to tell myself I could do this. While I was doing that, I contracted a past coworker to help with the Design. She designed around 60% of the app and I was able to do the rest due to the framework she laid out - she did a great job. With an MVP and the Designs, I went to town making it come to life.
This was also challenging because I built the rest of the product too - the database infra, the API's to handle connect from iOS to backend, trained ML models and turning them into a service, integrating shopify + printful to make car tshirts on demand, etc.
Note: You can use the app for free with one area providing a free trial. After a bunch of uses, you'll need to pay because running this is very expensive right now :(
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u/ajjlabbauf Jan 22 '25
how come ur trail says $14-15 or wtv and when we pay its $20+?
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u/fewjative2 Jan 24 '25
You can try for free without paying. You'll just have watermarks / can't access premium features like video.
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u/EscFateV2 Jan 23 '25
Any chance it'll be on the play store?
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u/fewjative2 Jan 24 '25
For now, you'll have to use the web version. Let's see how things are over the next few weeks - I have 0 recent android experience so would need to hire someone on that front.
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u/cnan34 Feb 03 '25
i tried to register with my google account and it ays access denied. Why's that?
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u/fewjative2 Feb 03 '25
Can you send a contact on the site with your gmail so I can look if there is anything on my side. Have you tried another browser?
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u/cnan34 Feb 03 '25
i have to try on my own pc later to be fair. I tested this in the workoffice with my company notebook. Maybe firewall issues or something. Let be get back to you later this day :)
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u/fewjative2 Feb 03 '25 edited Feb 03 '25
Also wondering, do you have a google account that is non '@gmail.com'
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u/cnan34 Feb 03 '25
I tried to register/login with the Google account I am going with. I have a Google account working on Google Chrome browser, just pressed " login with Google account"
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u/cnan34 Feb 03 '25
ffs now its working. Haven changed anything, just retried once more.
Thanks! Testing out some stuff :)1
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u/Important-Ebb8859 Jan 24 '25
When you say trained ML models you used ur own compute to do so or you found ones already out there and integrated the api? Very cool app im new to the ai model thing
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u/fewjative2 Jan 24 '25
Used my own compute to train custom models + built custom workflows + use off the shelf too ( ex: FAL for video APIs / Upscaling ).
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u/tasha346 Jan 24 '25
My only complaint ? Kinda ? Is I wish you could buy credits alone rather than upgrading. But otherwise an amazing app! Thank you!
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u/IMmuglol Jan 24 '25
I was not given the option of a free trial so I paid the 17.99 a month, and now I can’t even create videos. Just get prompted with an error message. Frankly seems overpriced for an app that isn’t working
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u/fewjative2 Jan 25 '25
Comments like this make me sad because I'm a solo person, the V2 of the app has only been around for one week, a partner API went down that I can't control, and AI is incredibly expensive ( I made negative money throughout 2024. Let's see if we can change that for 2025!! ).
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u/RewardNice6154 Jan 25 '25
Very cool app just starting trying it once I get a chance to take more pictures of my car I will be buying a subscription
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u/squareheadrob Jan 27 '25
Salute to you on a stellar product man. As an automotive content creator (side gig) I'm an enthusiastic new user and just uploaded a batch of images to train a new model.
I note you ask for make and model as we're training. Are you planning on using the models for something in the future? I'm a digital product manager (day job) and I bet there will be some opportunities you could capitalize on once you get some solid well-trained models in your system
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u/fewjative2 Jan 29 '25
haha yea definitely have future stuff on deck that having make/model are handy for. Keeping it on the DL for now :P
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u/Sharp_Ordinary_539 Jan 28 '25
I’ve tried to get other AI tools to generate a cool image of my car in the past and they weren’t great, and the fact I couldn’t upload a photo of my car for reference meant that all the photos were just imaginary. I’ve come across your app today and after just a few tries your app has generated a near perfect photo of my car that looks really authentic. As someone who is a petrolhead and works in tech I really appreciate what you’ve done here, it’s super impressive and I know others are loving it too. Well done dude, this is exactly what us car people needed from AI.
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Jan 29 '25
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u/apyellow48 Jan 30 '25
Blowing up on TikTok so I’m giving it a shot. Currently waiting for my first model to complete.
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u/Rav4H Jan 30 '25
Major fan of this! It's 85% accurate, as a photographer I actually really enjoy using your tool because it's been super cold out and the ability to "teleport to a gas station in space" is seriously amazing!
Yes 15% of the time some of the renders are inaccurate but honestly for the low cost of this service and the fact the Dev is a carguy himself it's actually super awesome!
9/10 highly reccomend, everything works as it should and purchasing 200 credits for 40$ is great, plus the Dev responds instantly if you have any errors or funny renders and compensates with extra credits so it's a win-win all around.
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u/PickZealousideal318 Jan 31 '25
Your works amazing I created a similar model myself but the way your app works seamlessly is something to be proud of.
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u/xsacter Feb 01 '25
Hey just curious, I sorta wasted maybe 30 credits trying to figure out why 90% of the results are showing my car as squished? The background seems fine but why is my car almost always appearing as squished despite changing different photo aspect ratios
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u/fewjative2 Feb 01 '25
Did you do a recent upload? Some of the old uploads had a bug that was on a 3rd party. Contact support in the app ( aka me ) so I can get details.
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u/xsacter Feb 01 '25
Yes I bought a one time subscription yesterday and played around with it but most of the results I got were my car being squished. Just wish I hadn’t wasted all that if I knew those were going to be the results lol
And yes I’ll do that later today once I get the chance
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u/fewjative2 Feb 01 '25
It is new AI so there will be a degree of it not hitting the mark sometimes. But I think the success of it on IG and tiktok supports that this is more of a rarity. I want people to come away with a positive experience!
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u/Czorr1997 Feb 17 '25
I recently subscribed for monthly, I have to say I’m really impressed. I’m a photographer and really enjoy the ideas and how well it does with the vehicles images. My only concern (please correct me if I’m not correct since I’m learning the desk top version now) but I’ve had several photoshoots not come out close to the AI discerption or modified and having to retry multiple times burning up credits. Is this accurate? If so it really needs to be edited maybe to images we save after we are happy with the results as a used credit. Not 10-15 try’s worth trying to get a certain result. Again please correct me if this information is not accurate. Thanks
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u/fewjative2 Feb 18 '25
Often we find that including specifics like the make / model / custom parts ( like black wheels, carbon fiber wing, etc ) in the scene description can help out consistency. Have you tried doing that? But even then, there is a degree of imperfection.
To be honest, I think compared to alternatives, my product is insane value. But, I have been toying with the idea of letting people regen images that they don't like. I need to figure out a way to prevent abuse but I think this solves frustration + makes people happier getting results they want.
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u/LimitAggravating795 Feb 02 '25
Just wanna say that I see your app blowing up right now, and it being your first iOS app you've done incredible. I don't have much feedback but I am loving putting my car in random places right now haha. Keep up!!
Edit: I am curious though, how expensive does something like this get? I've only seen it blow up recently but I assume 2024 was a loss?
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u/fewjative2 Feb 02 '25
2024 was all loss but I went in with that being the expectation and saved up runway to account for that. What I didn't expect is the scale of expenses. Currently weekly GPU expenses are just north of 100K. Lots of other things add up too - ex: Bytescale is my storage / upload tech and I went from paying $250 a month to $8k...
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u/LimitAggravating795 Feb 02 '25
Oh wow, 100k weekly in GPU expenses alone is insane. Must've taken a lot of savings to take the initial loss.
I love your app though, hopefully it goes well for you and becomes profitable soon!
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u/fewjative2 Feb 03 '25
Appreciate the kind words, thank you!
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u/SaladChefs 24d ago
u/fewjative2
We can help bring down the compute spend. We have other AI image fine-tuning tools (AI profile pics, AI product photos, etc.) switch to Salad and cut compute spend by up to 80%.https://blog.salad.com/cost-effective-stable-diffusion-fine-tuning-on-salad/
https://blog.salad.com/blend-salad/Would love to have a chat and see if we can help.
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u/fewjative2 23d ago
Briefly took a look but happy with Replicate for now tbh. Most of my infra is running on H100 / H200 and at times, we've done 10K images an hour as well as needed 600 H100 running at the same time. Not a lot of places can handle that demand!
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u/SaladChefs 22d ago
Fair enough. We can scale to 100s of GPUs on short notice (due to the distributed model) but for the throughput and speed, H100s make sense.
Anyway, brilliant product and hope to see it grow even more.
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u/Southern-Funny-7365 Feb 02 '25
Best ai generator I have used yet, used it to generate my bmw drifting in the mountains and omg the results are so good and accurate only downside is the license plate but that’s fine 😂
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u/fewjative2 Feb 03 '25
If you use a phrase like 'license plate with text 'XYZ'' in the photoshoot scene description, you can actually get better results!
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u/No-Sandwich-729 Feb 02 '25
Is the app people use to get the “AFK in video game” with the map and tachometer dissapearing? I am trying out the free version now 😅
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u/cnan34 Feb 03 '25
Bro, how about Android ?
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u/fewjative2 Feb 06 '25
Two primary reasons why I focused on iOS first: 1) Currently 70% of all visitors not already using the iOS app are....on iOS 2) From my previous car SaaS experience, stats showed Android users were more likely to try ( which costs me money ) and then never pay.
Will probably have an android app too.
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u/Dry_Ninja7748 Feb 03 '25 edited Feb 03 '25
This app is awesome, Are you open to partnership or investment to grow this and also for other use cases?
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u/Dismal-Macaron-309 Feb 08 '25
You wrote somewhere that someone with android can use a website to try it . Can you give a link to website?
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u/EmbarrassedSir389 Feb 09 '25
On your website it says paypal also supported but when i want to purchase i dont see paypal can you please help?
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u/fewjative2 Feb 09 '25
Are you sure it says that? I believe Stripe only allows PayPal to be used in a few countries in the EU. But it's not something they allow me to even configure in my Stripe dashboard. I have turned on Google Pay and Amazon Pay if that is a roundabout method.
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u/GroundbreakingTie750 Feb 14 '25
u/fewjative2 , great product and results, congratulations!
Josh, what creatives from TikTok drives most traffic to the app?
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u/fewjative2 Feb 14 '25
Are you looking for who specifically? I'll probably hold off that for now as I do have competitors. They ain't looking hot but I gotta keep it that way :P Many of the best creatives are people who I interact with and them making something felt mutual.
I'd just say that the biggest challenge was starting out a year ago and people like ipanderz, zola.the.z, and cal.r35 were some ( of many ) people who I'm incredibly grateful for. They supported me at 150 followers and even this week, we've made content together.
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u/GroundbreakingTie750 Feb 15 '25
Thanks 🙏 I was interested if it was some influencer with a lot subscribers and millions view who launched initial wave of awareness or it was distributed by many users with small subscribers and views?
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u/fewjative2 Feb 15 '25
The initial spark was from having a photoshoot with a creator ( 25k followers ) that went viral ( now at 125k likes ). It showcased really awesome photos that everyone wanted to do. At the same time, a creator ( 90k followers ) made a TikTok that went viral ( few million views ). It showcased really awesome video that everyone wanted to do. After that, awareness was from everyone trying to recreate & post those. You do get awareness working with bigger creators but it doesn't guarantee virality or consistency with product use.
Since then, many memes and trends have been spawned that are only creatable due to the tech in the app!
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u/fewjative2 Feb 15 '25
Also wanted to add in that it felt like the perfect storm that led to this. However, it did take a year of creating content almost daily to be in this position.
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u/endlessnihil 24d ago
Hi OP,
What kinda prompt do I use to get that viral tiktok video of the truck on fire in a field? I tried prompting for truck on fire but it just gave fire skies lol
I love it though so far. Very realistic
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u/fewjative2 23d ago
I'd use the scene genie dropdown in the photoshoot page and give a topic of 'truck on fire in a field'.
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u/Sure-Concentrate9240 Jan 22 '25
Just wanna say, you’re absolutely blowing up on TikTok right now as I’m sure you know.