Accepted into the Cloud Program with $100K in credits — on the strength of a working product, not a deck.
What we actually built
Not a wrapper. A working creative-execution layer for agencies, with Gemini, Imagen and Veo under the hood and Firebase and Vertex holding it up. We piloted it with the agency's own paying clients — real briefs, real deliverables.
Upload a template; Gemini finds the editable regions
Drop in an existing creative and the model detects which regions are text, logo, product, background — so a client's 40 festive variants come from one master, not forty designers-hours.
Region detection by model
No manual masking. Editable zones inferred from the design itself.
Built for volume
The agency's actual bottleneck: variants, not concepts.
An infinite canvas for generation and composition
Konva and PixiJS canvas where generated images, video and copy live side by side and get composed into finished creatives — with brand kits auto-generated by crawling the client's website.
Brand kits from a URL
Colours, fonts and tone pulled from the client's own site via Firecrawl.
Gemini · Imagen · Veo
Text, image and video generation behind one surface.
Workflows, credits, and an admin CMS
A workflow catalog for repeatable jobs, credit-based billing metered per generation, and an admin CMS to run it all. The unglamorous half that turns a demo into a product.
Credit billing
Every generation metered — which is exactly what the hacked key exploited.
Admin CMS
Templates, users, credits and workflows managed without touching code.
Cause of death
Three hits in one season. Someone hacked an API key and ran generation around the clock; the cloud bill hit ₹8 lakh we couldn't pay. The same month my co-founder went down with dengue. And Higgsfield took the category with capital we didn't have.
CAUSE OF DEATH · ITEMISED
three hits in one season
- Hacked API key₹8L cloud bill, unpayable
- Co-founder downdengue, worst possible month
- Market swallowedHiggsfield took the category
Verdictshut it down
no refunds on lessons. they're keepers.
Most portfolios hide this one. I think it's the most useful thing in mine.
What the corpse taught me
Watch the infra bill like it's your own money — because it was. Lock down every key. Meter every quota. Treat cloud spend as a product feature.
When I built ELTH next, I hunted down 1.9 million wasteful database reads a day before they could hurt anyone. Same scar, better reflexes.
And: shipping fast is survivable. Shipping fast without an ops guardrail is not. That's precisely the muscle you're renting when you hire me.