Removing a Photo's Background in the Browser, With No Upload: AI Licenses, ONNX Models, and a Frozen Tab

I wanted to add a background-removal tool to my site's image cluster that stayed true to the 100% client-side processing principle I already use for PDFs and image conversions. The path there was anything but linear: a library dropped over a licensing problem, a carefully chosen model that turned out more limited than expected, and a bug that froze the entire page — not just the tool — during computation. Here's the full build, including the parts that didn't work the first time. The starting problem: what's actually feasible for free? The initial idea was broad: remove backgrounds, and maybe unwanted objects too. The two tasks have very different difficulty levels. Removing objects requires inpainting — plausibly reconstructing the erased area — which in practice still means heavy generative models, impractical to run client-side with good quality on an average device. Removing a background , on the other hand, is a segmentation problem: separating a subject from its surroundings. That has much lighter models available, runnable entirely via WebAssembly with no server involved at all. So: background removal only, object removal shelved for later. The AGPL trap The first library that looked like a perfect fit turned out to be distributed under AGPL , a strong copyleft license. Free to use — but with a real catch for anyone embedding it in a public, closed-source web service: AGPL can require releasing the full source of the project that embeds it, under the same license. "Free for the end user" and "safe to drop into a closed-source commercial product" are two different questions, and it's worth answering the second one before writing integration code, not after deploying it. Before wiring any "free" AI library into a commercial project, check the exact license, not just the price tag. AGPL, GPL, and other strong copyleft licenses are fine for personal or internal tools, risky for a public closed-source product. The fix: switch to Transformers.js — Hugging Face's li