CleanWhiteBG

I build small tools, and this one started with a boring annoyance: sourcing product photos with inconsistent backgrounds.

Every background remover I tried had the same three problems. Watermarks on the free tier. Per-image pricing. Or an account wall before you could see whether the tool even worked.

So I built CleanWhiteBG. Upload an image, get a clean white background back. No signup, no watermark, no per-image cost, and uploads are deleted within two hours.

The engineering side turned out to be the interesting part, so here is the honest version.

The model runs in a container, not in the Worker. Background removal needs an ONNX runtime and real memory, so it runs as a Cloudflare Container with a BiRefNet model baked into the image at build time. The Next.js app runs as a Worker in front of it, and a Durable Object handles warm-up so the first request is not the one that pays for the cold start.

Cold starts were the main problem. Loading the ONNX model takes several seconds and users were staring at a spinner. I moved the model load into a background thread that starts as soon as the container boots, added a warm-up endpoint, and made the upload endpoint submit-then-poll instead of holding a request open. The wait now reads as processing rather than breakage.

Two smaller things cost me real time. The OpenNext image handler treats an environment binding named IMAGES as Cloudflare Images, which collided with the R2 bucket named cleanwhitebg-images and threw an error 1101 until I renamed the binding. And rate limiting needed a real platform binding rather than an in-memory counter, because Workers do not share memory across isolates.

What I have not solved: the high-quality mode hands off to a larger model and is noticeably slower. It is opt-in for that reason.

I am not going to pretend this is a business yet. It is a free tool I use myself, and the numbers so far are too small to be interesting. What I wanted was a place to put the write-up and a reason to keep the pipeline honest.

If you shoot product photos and white backgrounds are a recurring chore, I would genuinely like to know what breaks for you.

Disclosure: I built CleanWhiteBG, so this post is about my own product.