Who makes Shotluma, and how is a free tool paid for?

Key points

• One maintainer, no company, no funding round, and no revenue from Shotluma itself.
• Licensed under MIT, so the project survives its maintainer: anyone may fork, host and keep shipping it.
• AI generation is not free in the absolute sense — it runs on your provider key, billed by that provider at their rates. Shotluma takes no cut and adds no markup.
• The main risk of a one-person project is the obvious one: if the maintainer stops, releases stop. The licence is the mitigation, not a promise of permanence.

Who builds it

Shotluma is a solo project by Zachi. There is no team, no company behind the name, and no support desk. Code, design, the editor and this site are all one person’s work.

• github.com/realZachi — code and issues
• @iam_zachi — release notes and the occasional screenshot
• zachi.dev — everything else

The fastest way to reach a human about Shotluma is a GitHub issue. It is public, it is tracked, and it does not get lost.

How a free tool is paid for

Shotluma earns nothing. There is no paid tier, no usage limit that unlocks with money, no sponsorship, no affiliate links and no advertising. The costs are small and personal: a domain, and static hosting for two sites that serve files and run no application server.

This works because of what the architecture does not do. There is no database of user projects, no rendering farm, no accounts to store and no AI bill to absorb — the editor runs in your browser and AI runs on your own provider key. A user who never opens the site again costs nothing, and a user who generates a hundred screenshot sets costs nothing either.

What it costs you

The editor itself is free to open and use, including exports. The part that can cost money is AI generation, and that cost is not Shotluma’s.

1. You bring an API key from a provider you already have an account with.
2. The key is stored in your browser and sent only to that provider, only for the requests you trigger.
3. That provider bills you directly, at their published rates. Shotluma never sees the invoice and takes no share of it.

You can also skip AI entirely and use the editor by hand. Nothing is gated behind a key.

What Shotluma is not

A page written by a maintainer is a poor place to look for drawbacks, so here they are stated plainly.

• It is not a general design tool. It builds Apple App Store screenshot sets, and the editor is shaped around that one job. Its export sizes do not currently satisfy Google Play, which rejects a screenshot whose long side is more than twice its short side.
• It is not a hosted service. Projects live in your browser, which means no sync between devices, no shared team workspace and no server-side backup.
• It is not backed by a support contract. Issues are answered when the maintainer has time.
• It is not a guarantee of store approval. Store review rules are the platform’s, and they change.

Where the code lives

The editor at app.shotluma.com is open source under the MIT licence¹ (source 1). Clone it, read it, change it, or run your own copy — there is no contributor licence agreement to sign and no attribution requirement on the screenshots you export.

This marketing site is a separate, private repository. It carries the landing page, the analytics configuration and the deployment setup, and none of that is needed to run the editor.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. 1MIT licence — Shotluma on GitHub, full licence text. Read 22 August 2026.