Work that used to cost credits, done without a GPU

August 25, 2026

* All of this was checked on a Windows laptop with no graphics card.

Verified

Remove a background

rembg. Keeps the subject and cuts everything else out. A 1GB model downloads once, then it's seconds per image.

• Result: the background went fully transparent and the subject's edges held up
• Install: pip install rembg onnxruntime
• Good for: product photos, characters, stickers
• Not for: artwork where the whole frame is the piece. There is no background to remove

Transcribe speech

Whisper's small model. A three-second Korean clip came back with no errors, in 2.1 seconds, with no graphics card. Accuracy on languages other than English varies by language and by model size.

• Good for: captions, meeting notes, voice memos
• Blocker: run time scales with the length of the file

Cut, join, and caption video

ffmpeg. It was already inside a Python package, so nothing needed installing. Burning captions into video works.

• Blocker: the caption font has to be specified. Without it, non-Latin text renders as boxes

Narration voice

Windows ships system voices. Feed one some text and an audio file comes out. Which languages are available depends on what's installed.

• Limit: not natural enough to pass for a person. It sits at the level of a station announcement

Build a font

fontTools produced a working TTF.

• Good for: a typeface built from scanned handwriting, or a font that holds nothing but icons

Make a game

Godot. It runs from the command line with no window open. 3D space, physics, and collisions are available, and an APK came out.

• Cost: free (MIT)
• Blocker: the prebuilt export template targets API 34. Store releases need a different path
• Trap: with the editor window open, settings written to a file are ignored. Close it first

Shrink a 3D file

gltfpack. Cuts vertex data in a GLB with one option. It uses a standard extension, so other loaders still read it.

• Cost: free (MIT)

Wire up ads

Google publishes sample ad IDs tied to no account. Ad integration can be built and tested on a real device before an ad account exists.

• Limit: no revenue. Swapping in the real IDs later is a string change

Not yet tried

• Image upscaling with spandrel. The loader is installed and only the model file is missing

Where free loses

Generating new images is different. Running an image model without a graphics card takes minutes per image. Saving money here costs more time than it's worth.

Free wins on processing images and audio that already exist. Cutting, erasing, joining, transcribing. Creating from nothing still favors paying.

What's been verified