SketchWish

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  Clean Line Art

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  Finished line-art sketch

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  Watercolor Sketch

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  Pencil Sketch

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  Colored Pencil

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  Ink Sketch

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  Charcoal Sketch

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  Photo to sketch, side by side

Inspiration

Print-on-demand sellers and gift buyers constantly need custom sketch art, but commissioning an artist is slow and expensive, and cheap photo filters are not good enough to sell. We wanted a tool that turns a single photo into genuinely sellable sketch art in seconds, at a price a solo seller can afford.

What it does

SketchWish turns any photo into a print-ready sketch in seconds. You upload a photo, choose from 10 art styles (pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolor, line art, and more), and Google Gemini draws a high-resolution sketch you can export for print, up to 4K. New users get 3 free renders after a one-tap Google sign-in, then buy credits. It is live in production at sketchwish.com today.

How we built it

Gemini is the engine, not an add-on. Gemini's image model (Nano Banana 2) renders the sketch from the uploaded photo and the chosen style, and Gemini Flash reads the photo first so the sketch stays true to the subject. The app is Next.js 15 on Vercel, with Supabase for Google sign-in, Cloudflare R2 for storage, Upstash for rate limiting, Stripe for live payments, and PostHog for analytics. Because Gemini Flash is fast and low cost, we can offer real free renders and still keep margin.

Challenges we ran into

A free-render tool is a magnet for abuse, so we went Google-sign-in only and hard-capped generation to stop farmed accounts. Google blocks sign-in inside Facebook and Instagram in-app browsers, so we built an escape that routes those users out to a real browser. And when the Gemini model in our original plan was retired mid-build, we migrated the pipeline to the current models with no downtime.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We shipped a live, working product with reach across 18 countries. We used our own analytics to catch that broad ad targeting was sending low-intent traffic, and to find and fix real conversion bugs in the funnel. Our cost per sketch is low enough that a genuine free tier is sustainable.

What we learned

Traffic quality beats volume: cheap clicks convert at nearly zero. And the on-site funnel matters just as much: a single broken login button silently sank motivated visitors until our analytics caught it and we fixed it.

What's next for SketchWish

A product demo as our primary ad creative to bring high-intent traffic, bulk generation and an API for print shops, and more styles and larger export sizes.

Built With

• cloudflare-r2
• gemini
• google-gemini
• google-oauth
• nano-banana
• nextjs
• posthog
• react
• stripe
• supabase
• typescript
• upstash
• vercel