CrushSVG built a free SVG to PNG converter as a solo dev/student — here's why and what I learned
Hey IH 👋
I'm a software engineering student who also does freelance web dev and design work on the side. A recurring headache in almost every client project: someone hands me an SVG logo or icon, and I need a clean PNG version for an email template, a landing page, or a Canva mockup fast.
Every existing converter I tried had some annoying catch: forced signup after one use, ads everywhere, quality loss on export, or a UI clearly built in 2014. So I built CrushSVG a free, browser-based SVG to PNG converter. Paste your SVG code, upload a file, or drag and drop it, and export a crisp PNG up to 4000×4000px with transparent background support. No install, and you get 3 free conversions before you even need an account.
A few things worth mentioning:
It's fully bootstrapped just me, building this around university coursework and client work, no funding, no team.
Everything runs client-side in the browser, so files are never uploaded to a server. That was a deliberate choice after seeing how many "free" tools quietly store your files.
I built it because I needed it myself for client work, not because I set out to build a SaaS company. It just turned out other people (email devs, marketers, agencies) have the exact same annoying problem.
What I learned building this as a student on the side:
Shipping something small and genuinely useful is way harder than it sounds when you're also juggling assignments and client deadlines. I underestimated how much time "boring" stuff like SVG edge case handling (weird viewBoxes, embedded fonts, nested groups) would eat up compared to the actual UI.
I'm still actively improving it, and I'd genuinely love feedback from this community:
Have you run into SVGs that break most online converters? I want to stress-test against real edge cases.
Would batch conversion actually be useful to you, or is single-file fine for most use cases?
Happy to answer anything about the build, the stack, or student-life-meets-freelancing-meets-side-project balance.
It’s definitely a recurring utility. Asset optimization is a standard step in every web project. Agencies use it repeatedly across different builds because every new UI means a fresh batch of SVGs, and local processing removes NDA friction.
Appreciate it! You can get everything about us from The Nevon website. If you want to see the privacy aspect in action before we chat, run a test on our crushsvg website, link in my profile, with your browser's Network tab open. You'll see zero outbound requests everything executes locally in the DOM.
You hit the nail on the head regarding user behavior.
Frankly, I suspect speed and zero-friction are what actually get agencies in the door. The privacy aspect is likely a secondary realization, they don't actively worry about it until that split second hesitation before uploading an unreleased NDA logo to a random server. That's the exact moment the local execution proves its worth.
I'd love to hear your raw thoughts once you test the workflow. Feel free to tear the UX apart, always looking for blind spots.