Support the project.
PaintFE is primarily developed by one person and released under the MIT License. You can help through discussion, testing, contributions, or an optional donation.
Hey, 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.
There's no company behind this. Running costs are basically the developer's time, the occasional test GPU, and caffeine.
PaintFE is fully-featured for everyone. No premium tier, no early access, no in-app badges. Donations just help the developer spend more time on it.