Honestly, I just spent about 4 hours bashing my head against a wall trying to figure out how to build a 100% offline, free Canva alternative from scratch. It felt downright impossible, and after trying everything I could think of, I have to admit I just don’t have the technical chops to pull off a fully local build right now. Definitely something I want to tackle again in the future once I learn more.

For now, huge shoutout to the OpenDesign project by clawnify(https://github.com/clawnify/OpenDesign). I ended up integrating their open-source project to power the editor here.

Important heads-up: Because this setup relies on a server, it is not 100% local. If you’re working with private or confidential files, please make sure to delete your projects when you’re done so nobody else can see them.

On the bright side, I did get the background remover working completely offline! It runs 100% locally using an in-browser AI model. The only catch is that on the first run, it has to download a ~300–500MB model file once. After that initial download, it processes everything right on your machine.