About GifBench — Privacy-First Creative Tools

Every popular online GIF tool works the same way: you hand over your file, a server does the work, you download the result. That is a reasonable engineering choice and a bad deal for you. Your screen recording of an internal dashboard, the photos of your kid, the clip from a call — all of it sits on somebody else's disk, under a retention policy you did not read.

Browsers can now decode video, run shaders, and encode GIF and MP4 without help. Once that became true, the upload stopped being necessary, and a tool that still requires one is asking for trust it does not need. So we built the version that does not ask.

Working this way costs us things. There is no server-side rendering farm, so a very long 4K source is limited by your machine rather than ours. There is no account, so we cannot sync your projects between devices. There is no telemetry, so we find out something is broken when someone emails us.

We think those are the right trades, but they are trades, and the tool is better described honestly than sold as magic. Where a limitation exists, the interface says so at the point you hit it rather than in a footnote.

The marketing pages are static HTML with no client-side framework doing anything at runtime. The editor is a single script that boots on demand: Canvas2D for compositing, WebGL2 for colour grading, Web Workers for GIF encoding, WebCodecs for video when the browser has it and MediaRecorder when it does not.

One compositor draws both the preview and every export, which is why what you see is what you get. Nothing about this requires a network connection after the page has loaded.

A small remote team. We are not venture funded, which is why the business model is a one-time purchase rather than an attention-harvesting free tier.

Feedback, bug reports and disagreements are all welcome at [email protected]. Bug reports do not need a template — a description of what you imported and what happened is plenty.