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About ZeroBG

ZeroBG removes the background from an image without ever sending that image anywhere. The AI runs inside your own browser tab. There is no upload step, no account, no watermark, and no limit on how many images you process or how large they are.

Why it exists

Almost every free background remover works the same way: you hand your photo to a server, their hardware processes it, you download the result. For a holiday snap that is fine. For a client photo under an NDA, an unreleased product shot, a passport application, or a picture of your children, you have just given a copy to a company whose retention policy you did not read and whose breach history you cannot see.

The usual reassurance is a sentence on a marketing page: encrypted in transit, deleted after 24 hours, never used for training. Those may all be true. None of them are things you can check. A promise to delete something later is a policy, enforced by process, and processes lapse.

ZeroBG takes the other approach. If the image never leaves the device, there is nothing to retain, nothing to breach, and nothing to take on trust. That claim is verifiable in about thirty seconds: open your browser's developer tools, watch the Network tab, and remove a background. Nothing outbound carries your image, because there is no endpoint for it to go to. The guide to checking this yourself walks through what to look for, and it works on any background remover, not just this one.

How it actually works

When you first use the tool, your browser downloads a segmentation model, a quantised build of ISNet, along with the ONNX Runtime WebAssembly that executes it. That is roughly 65MB, once, and it is then cached. It downloads only when you show intent to use the tool, so a visitor who reads this page and leaves pays nothing for it.

From then on the work happens on your own CPU or GPU. WebAssembly does the heavy lifting, with WebGPU acceleration where your browser supports it, and inference runs off the main thread so the page stays responsive. Everything after segmentation, compositing a new background, adjusting the subject, the shadow and glow effects, the touch-up brush, and the final export, is ordinary canvas work in the same tab.

A consequence worth knowing: because the model is cached locally, ZeroBG keeps working with no internet connection at all once you have run it online once. That is genuinely offline, not a degraded mode. The offline guide explains the setup.

What it does not do well

Running on your device instead of a datacentre involves real trade-offs, and pretending otherwise would undermine the point of the rest of this page.

• The first run needs that 65MB download. On a slow mobile connection this is a genuine wait.
• The quantised model keeps the download manageable, but a paid cloud service will still do better on the hardest edges, flyaway hair and fine fur especially. That is exactly why there is a manual erase and restore brush for fixing what the model gets wrong.
• Large images take longer on older machines, because it is your hardware doing the work.
• It needs a reasonably modern browser. WebAssembly is required; WebGPU makes it considerably faster where available.

Who makes it

ZeroBG is an independent side project built and maintained by one person, not a company or a funded startup. That shapes what it is: there is no sales team, no upsell, no free tier designed to frustrate you into a paid one, and no roadmap driven by investors. It also means support is best effort and features arrive when there is time. You can get in touch here, and reports of bad cutouts or factual errors on the site are genuinely welcome.

How it is funded

The tool is free and has no paid tier. Running it costs almost nothing in compute, since your device does the processing, but the domain and hosting are not free. Costs are covered by advertising on the site and by voluntary donations from people who find it useful.

Google Analytics and AdSense load for everyone, but until you accept they run with consent defaulted to denied: no analytics or advertising cookies are written and the ads you see are non-personalised. Microsoft Clarity, which records sessions, is never loaded unless you accept. Whatever you choose, the background remover works exactly the same, because the editor has never depended on any of it. That split is deliberate: session recording is by far the most invasive thing here, and a tool that argues your images should stay private would be a poor advertisement for itself if it recorded your screen without asking first. The privacy policy names every third party involved.