About HEICPix

iPhones save photos as HEIC. Most other devices — Windows PCs, older Androids, web tools, email clients, social platforms — don't know what to do with them. So millions of people search "heic to jpg" every month, click the first result, and upload private photos to someone else's server.

The free tools are the worst offenders. iloveimg caps you at 5 files unless you pay. CloudConvert caps you at 25/day. Both require uploading your photos to a server you can't audit. online-convert is plastered with ads and pop-ups. heictojpg.com uploads to S3 and you have no idea how long they keep it.

For a routine task — open a photo your phone took — the privacy tradeoff is absurd. Your wedding photos shouldn't have to leave your device just so your aunt's Windows laptop can open them.

HEICPix runs entirely inside your browser. When you drop a HEIC file, it stays on your device. Conversion happens via WebAssembly (a compiled version of libheif, the same library macOS uses internally). The output JPG, PNG, WebP, or AVIF is generated in your tab and offered as a download link or saved to a folder you pick.

There is no server. There's nothing to upload to. The site is a bunch of static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files on Cloudflare Pages — no database, no user accounts, no upload endpoint, no background workers processing your photos. You can disable your internet after the page loads and conversion still works.

That architectural choice cascades into every other property of the product: unlimited batches (no per-conversion server cost), no signup (no user data to manage), no ads (no business model that depends on inventory), and — most importantly — no "free trial that becomes a subscription" because there's nothing to charge for.

HEICPix is built and maintained by Shrestha Tripathi, a software engineer based in India. It's part of the WorksOffline family of privacy-first browser tools — small, focused apps that run on your device instead of the cloud.

The full source isn't open at the moment (the repo is private while we iterate fast), but the architectural decisions, the stack, and the tradeoffs are all documented in how-it-works and free-forever. If you'd like the source opened or want to contribute, get in touch — we'll consider it.

The honest answer: it costs almost nothing to run. There is no server doing conversions on our behalf — your browser does that work, on your CPU, with electricity you're already paying for. Cloudflare Pages hosts the static files on a free plan. The only recurring cost is the domain (~₹500/yr).

We're not running a charity — but we're also not running a startup that has to pay back investors. HEICPix is a side project that happens to be useful. Maybe one day there will be unobtrusive sponsorship or affiliate links to recommended camera gear. There will never be ads, watermarks, file caps, email walls, or "upgrade to remove this" friction.