FaceApp alternatives
Face editing: retouch skin, makeup, and the age and smile filters.
1 of its 7 core features can be rebuilt with AI. Here is one, working, below.
- They makeRevenue estimate on Sensor Tower
- $14M a month
- You pay
- $60 a year
- AI can rebuild
- 1 of 7 core features
Paste it in your chat
Use ChatGPT or Gemini, not Claude. The job is making a new picture. ChatGPT and Gemini generate images; Claude reads them and cannot.
Open in ChatGPTBe my face editor. I send a photo, you send it back changed. Use ChatGPT or Gemini for this one, not Claude. Claude reads pictures but cannot make them, and making them is the whole job here. ## Start here When I paste this, reply in one or two sentences: tell me what you can do to a photo, and ask me to send one. Nothing else — no feature list, no explanation of how it works. ## What I will ask for - **Retouch** — even the skin, whiten the teeth, brighten the eyes, take out a blemish. Keep it recognisably me: this is a good photo of my face, not a different face. - **Age me** — older or younger, by however many years I say. - **Change my hair** — colour, length, style, a beard on or off. - **Makeup** — lips, brows, lashes, however heavy I say. - **Expression** — a smile, or a smaller one. - **Background** — swap it, blur it, or clean it up. Do the one thing I asked and leave the rest alone. If I say "whiten the teeth" and you also slim the jaw, that is a worse result even if it looks better. ## Every time you send one back Show me the edited photo, then in one line say what you changed and offer the two most likely next steps — "want it stronger, or shall I do the eyes too?". Always give me somewhere to go next. If I say "too much", redo it at about half the strength rather than asking me how much. Keep the original. When I say "back to the start", go to the photo I first sent, not the last edit. ## What I will not accept Do not smooth the whole face into plastic. Skin has texture and it should still have it afterwards. Do not change my ethnicity, my bone structure or my body while doing something else. If I ask for something you will not do, say so in one line and tell me what you can do instead. ## How to talk to me Short. The photo is the answer, so let it be. No preamble, no "great choice", no explaining that beauty is subjective.
Try it
Visual demo only. Copy the prompt below to get the app.
Build it yourself
Real files on your machine, a real database, and it is yours. This one carries the interface as well — the layout, the colours and the shape of the real app, read off its own screens.
Each opens with the prompt loaded and waiting — nothing is sent until you press enter. It is copied at the same time, in case the app is not installed.
Build me a local face editor I own, to replace FaceApp. - A CLI plus a small local page: Python, FastAPI, OpenCV and Pillow, data in a SQLite file next to it. - The part a browser cannot do: MediaPipe Face Mesh locally for 468 landmarks, with lips, teeth, eyes, brows and skin as real masks rather than a brush I aim myself. - Retouch as masked operations at a strength I set: bilateral skin smoothing that keeps the pores, teeth whitening in the mouth mask, eye brightening, and blemish removal by inpainting. - Makeup as colour blended into a landmark mask in Lab space, so lips and blush read as skin, then global tone in linear light: exposure, contrast, warmth and saturation. - Model it properly: photos, and an ordered list of operations per photo with parameters and mask. Non-destructive, and a saved list applies to any other photo. - The age, smile, gender and hair transforms need a generative model, which with a terminal I can have: an image model over HTTP, key from .env, costing per image. The photo leaves the machine for that call. - One command to run a folder through a saved edit, one to back up the database. - Binds to localhost only. No accounts, no telemetry, nothing leaves the machine but that call. - Skip: background swap, and a phone app beside the camera roll. - Include a README with setup, installing MediaPipe, and where the key goes. ## Look and feel FaceApp's own — dark near-black, the photo large and central, a warm pink-red accent on the active tool, effects as a bottom filmstrip. Generous spacing, clear hierarchy, big tap targets, phone-readable type, system font. Keep the text dark enough to read at a glance: the softness of a palette belongs to the shapes and the fills, never to the words. Nothing I need to read — dates, numbers, labels — in pale grey on white.
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Feature by feature
Every feature, whether AI can rebuild it, and what you would be signing up to keep running if you did. The paid app does that last column for you, and that is most of what the money buys.
| Feature | Core | AI can rebuild | You'd maintain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smooth skinFace-aware retouching is a trained model. Claude reads pictures; it cannot repaint them. | Yes | No | Nothing |
| Whiten teeth and brighten eyesFace-aware retouching is a trained model. Claude reads pictures; it cannot repaint them. | Yes | No | Nothing |
| Remove blemishes and spotsFace-aware retouching is a trained model. Claude reads pictures; it cannot repaint them. | Yes | No | Nothing |
| Makeup: lips, blush, brows and eye colourSame: this paints new pixels onto a face. | Yes | No | You would paint the areas yourself |
| Colour, tone and filter looks | Yes | Yes | Nothing |
| Face detection that finds the features for youWithout this every tool becomes a brush you aim yourself, which is the honest difference between the rebuild and the app. | Yes | Partly | Free browser face models exist, and they are slower and rougher |
| Age, gender swap, smile and hair transformsThis is the whole reason FaceApp is famous. It is a trained model generating a new face, not a slider, and there is no browser version of it. | Yes | No | Costs money per photo |
| Background swap and lens blur | No | Partly | Needs a cut-out model, and free ones are slow on a phone |
| Editing on your phone next to the camera roll | No | No | Not possible on the web |
What you give up
- the age, smile and hair filters people install it for
- the app knowing where your eyes and mouth are
- a good result without you aiming anything
- editing on your phone, where the selfies already are
Why people still pay
Nobody downloads FaceApp for the teeth whitening. They pay for a model that can imagine your face at seventy, and that is trained weights and paid inference, not a slider you can be given in a chat window.
Or use one somebody already built
Free and open source. No prompt, no building, no subscription.
Other apps people are freeing
Questions
- Can AI really replace FaceApp?
- 1 of its 7 core features, yes. The demo above is what one prompt produced. What it cannot do is on this page too.
- What does FaceApp cost?
- About $60 a year on the FaceApp Pro plan. A handful of filters with a watermark and ads. The famous transforms are Pro.
- Is there a free alternative to FaceApp?
- Yes: GIMP, Photopea. They are listed below, and they are somebody else's finished work rather than yours.