ai-headshots is a headshot generator built on Replicate, started in May as a SaaS experiment. It is an AI wrapper. Half the appeal was the margin: Replicate inference cost pennies for an image, and the plan was to charge a 1000% markup for what amounted to a worse version of what Replicate already did. The other half was finishing the MVP as practice with CloudFlare and with the business side of software. The project was left in a state that almost worked, and the results were not that great. It was built before the image generation advances that arrived a few months later, so it may get picked up again.
The problem that still needs an answer is why anyone would pay for it when Gemini, ChatGPT, or Replicate will produce a headshot for free. The bar for shipping it as paid software is whether a customer would feel comfortable paying for it. As it stands, the only thing users would waste on it is their time, not their money.
The business would also need to capture attention fast, and for cheap. Replicate could charge $1 per call instead of 1 cent, or change its terms of service, and the business would no longer be feasible. The lean model would make cutting losses, or pivoting, easy.