No subscription. No "pro tier". No guilt trips. But if PaintFE has saved you time or made something you're proud of, the developer would genuinely appreciate a coffee.
☕ Buy a Coffee on Ko-fi ♥ GitHub SponsorsHey, I'm Kyle, the dev behind PaintFE.
For almost a decade now, I’ve worked as a software engineer, but I've been a heavy user of photo editing tools my entire life. I always loved the snappy feel of classic Paint.NET and wanted something just as modern and lightweight, a tool that ran flawlessly on Windows but didn't feel clunky on Linux. Since I couldn't quite find it, I decided to build it.
I was actually gifted a GitHub Copilot trial, and I eventually decided to give it a go as an excuse to learn Rust. That simple experiment quickly got out of hand in the best possible way. Having AI speed up the initial boilerplate let me focus entirely on the design and architecture, turning a small test into a fast, free tool worth releasing.
I work on this in my spare time because free software is kind of wonderful, and I'd rather ship something people can actually use than put it behind a paywall.
If you want to kick a few dollars my way, that's great and I genuinely appreciate it. If you don't, no hard feelings at all. Just use it. Make things with it.
Pick whatever works for you.
Nope. PaintFE is and will remain fully-featured for everyone. There's no premium tier, no early access track, and no badges in the app. Donations just help the developer spend more time on it.
Honestly? Coffee, occasionally a new test GPU, and the motivation to keep going. There's no company behind this, so running costs are basically the developer's time.
Whatever you make with it, I hope it works out.
☕ Buy a Coffee Download Free