Image and video decision
Layer Blur
A competent developer can reproduce the core Layer Blur Generator as a static client-side app in about one week; the paid product mainly buys polish, hosting, and support.
Visit website↗Built by Ozgur Ozer, who ships 12 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$50one-off24 h to build
$0/mo1 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Layer Blur alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Upload or create layers, reorder layers and set background color, adjust blur and canvas size/zoom, render on an HTML5 canvas, export PNG or CSS.
What it still won’t have
- Polished cross-browser UI and subtle UX polish found in a paid product
- Built-in analytics, telemetry, and crash reporting
- Hosted reliability, CDN edge assets, and a managed export pipeline
- Customer support and product updates/roadmap
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Layer Blur does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-page React + Vite web app that runs entirely client-side and uses an HTML5 canvas (or WebGL shader) to compose multiple ordered layers and apply blur. Core features in scope: image upload per-layer, add/remove/reorder layers via drag-and-drop, color/background picker, width/height and zoom controls, blur amount slider, live preview, export PNG (canvas.toBlob) and export a CSS snippet reproducing the effect. Out of scope: user accounts, server-side rendering, analytics, payments. Require: graceful error handling for corrupted uploads, accessibility basics, unit tests for core logic (layer ordering, export functions), and end-to-end test covering a full export flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score90
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productLayer Blur Generator
- open sourceGraphiteEditor/Graphite
- open sourceT8RIN/ImageToolbox
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
