Build an AI portrait app in a minute and get paid for every picture

The picture format that ate the feed

The trend has a date. Google released its image model under the nickname Nano Banana on August 26, 2025, and within days the feeds filled with 3D figurines: a miniature of the person, boxed, on a desk. Nine days after launch, Google's Josh Woodward said more than 200 million images had been edited and more than 10 million of the people making them were new to the Gemini app (as reported by 9to5Google on September 4, 2025, checked September 2026). TechCrunch traced the figurine wave from Thailand to Indonesia to India, where it turned into vintage-style portraits inspired by 1990s Bollywood (September 17, 2025, checked September 2026).

The second version arrived on February 26, 2026. Google published Nano Banana 2 under the model name Gemini 3.1 Flash Image and described it as Pro-level quality at Flash speed, with character resemblance held across up to five characters in one workflow (Google's announcement, checked September 2026). That is the model behind every picture a JustCopy app makes.

Here is what matters for you. A format this popular is not one app. It is a thousand niches: portraits in a wedding style, a team in matching jerseys, a pet as a knight, a book club as a comic panel. Each niche is a page with a text box and a button. The people who built those pages last year needed a developer, an API key and a payment integration. Now they need a sentence.

The one sentence

Open JustCopy and type what the page does. A description that works: a one-page app where a visitor describes themselves in a few words, picks one of four styles, presses a button and gets a portrait they can download. Say the four styles if you have them in mind. Say what the page should be called. That is enough.

The agent writes the page, tests it as a visitor would, and shows it in the pane on the right. It knows the platform can make pictures from words, so the button is wired to the image model without you asking. Under the hood the page calls one thing, window.media.image, with the visitor's words and the chosen style, and gets back a stored file with a lasting link. You never see that line, and you do not need to.

Try it yourself before anyone else does. The free plan lets you make three pictures a day in the studio at our cost, so you can check the styles, tune the wording, and change what you do not like by typing the change in the chat. The sign-in page, the account, the storage of every picture a user makes: all of that is part of the app already.

Set a price above 15 cents

A picture costs 15 cents on JustCopy. That is the unit price, the same on every plan, and it comes out of the prepaid balance on your account when you or your app makes one. When you publish, a step asks whether to charge your users. Say yes and the picture gets a price of your own. It starts at twice the unit price, 30 cents, and you can type anything above 15 cents.

The split is fixed and written into the platform. JustCopy takes the unit price first, then 25 percent of whatever you add above it. You keep 75 percent of the markup. Nothing is deducted from your balance for a user's picture, because the user paid for it. Here is a $1 picture, line by line:

One hundred pictures at $1 earn you $63.75. A thousand earn $637.50. The share does not change with volume, and there is no monthly fee for the charging feature itself. Earnings accrue on every use and pay out monthly once they pass $25. If you would rather collect through your own Stripe account and keep the whole markup, that option is on the Business plan at $99.99 a month; below it, JustCopy collects.

Your users never see any of this arithmetic. Your app gets a /plans page in its own design and an “Add to balance” button. A visitor who has not paid and presses the button sees a plain line offering to add to their balance, adds $5 or $10, and the next picture is deducted at your price. There is no checkout you built and no card you touched.

What the model will not draw

The honest part. The feed trend is built on selfies: upload your face, get your figurine. A JustCopy app does not do that. Every request goes through content rules before the picture is made, and three kinds are refused. Design your app around what is allowed and it will do well. Design it around a selfie and it will refuse your first customer.

What works instead is description. A visitor types “curly red hair, round glasses, a green cardigan, holding a cat” and picks the figurine style, and the picture is a figurine of that person, in the sense that it is unmistakably them to their friends without being a copy of their face. The vintage studio portrait, the trading card, the comic cover, the knight and the astronaut all work the same way. A visitor can also make a set of characters: the model holds up to five of them consistent across pictures, so a family, a band or a team stays recognizable from one picture to the next.

Two more limits worth stating. A picture takes a few seconds, not an instant, so the page should show that it is working. And a style that puts a name on a jersey or a title on a box should let the visitor try again if the lettering comes out wrong. Your app can offer a retry; it costs another picture.

From sentence to paid app

1. 1

   Describe the app

   One message: a page where a visitor describes themselves, picks a style, and gets a portrait. The page is on screen in under a minute.

2. 2

   Set your price

   On first publish, choose to charge your users. The picture defaults to twice the unit price. Type $1, or whatever your audience will pay.

3. 3

   Publish and share

   One tap publishes. Put the link in your bio. Your users add to a balance and every picture is deducted at your price.

Building and publishing is free and needs no card; a free-plan site carries a small JustCopy badge. Charging your users needs a paid plan, from Hobby at $9.99 a month, which also puts the app on your own domain without the badge. Every plan has a daily spending ceiling for the app, so a viral day cannot run past what you set, and you can raise it from Settings.

Why a niche beats a clone

The general-purpose portrait app already exists, and it is the one with the model's own name on it. You will not beat it on breadth. A creator with an audience wins on the opposite: one style, named for the community, with the exact words their followers would use. A knitting channel gets portraits holding the follower's current project. A running club gets finisher cards. A wedding photographer sells couples a comic-book cover of their day, described rather than copied.

Each of those is a different sentence to JustCopy and a different price to the audience. The $1 picture is a starting point. A style people share pays more than a style people keep. Test two prices on two pages; both are free to build, and the earnings page in your dashboard shows which one is working within the week. No app built this way has an earnings history to show you yet. The arithmetic above is the whole promise, and it is written into the platform rather than into this post.

Questions