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How to Clone Facetune

Selfie and portrait retouching subscription app

iOS medium to clone Freemium subscription (free editor with watermark/limits, premium weekly/yearly plan)
Est. monthly revenue
$8M–$15M/mo
rough estimate, 2025
MVP build time
2–4 weeks with AI builders
full version: 3–4 months
Clone prompts
5 builders
Lovable · Bolt · Cursor · v0 · Base44
Briefing

What is Facetune?

Facetune (by Lightricks) is the app that taught a generation how to retouch a selfie. Smooth skin, whiten teeth, reshape a jaw, brighten eyes, erase a blemish - all with a finger swipe. It started as a paid app, became a juggernaut on the App Store, and then converted to a subscription model that now drives most of its revenue. The product is narrow on purpose: it does faces, and it does them better than a general photo editor.

What makes Facetune defensible is the on-device retouching tech - real-time face detection, skin-aware smoothing, and AI features like background swaps, makeup and 'AI portraits'. Most of the magic is a tight feedback loop: tap a tool, drag on the photo, see the result instantly. The newer AI features (generative backgrounds, headshot generation) lean on heavier models, but the core retouch toolkit is classic computer-vision image processing.

For a cloner, the realistic opportunity is NOT to out-engineer Lightricks on face geometry. It's to package a focused retouch toolkit for a specific audience - a 'LinkedIn headshot fixer', a 'dating-profile photo polisher', a 'real-estate agent headshot app' - where AI background and skin tools (via APIs) plus a few manual sliders deliver 90% of the value. Be honest with yourself: pixel-perfect face reshaping is hard; AI-API-backed retouch for a niche is very buildable.

Who it's for: Selfie-takers, content creators, influencers and anyone posting profile photos - skewing 16–34 and female-leaning, but profile-photo polishing is universal. Clone opportunities target a niche use case: dating profiles, professional headshots, real-estate agents, e-commerce model shots.

Revenue model

How Facetune makes money

Revenue estimate
$8M–$15M/mo

Rough estimate of app-store consumer spend based on public third-party reports; Lightricks revenue spans several apps. CloneMRR is not affiliated with Facetune; figures are for educational purposes.

Spec sheet

Features to build

MVP ship this first

  • Photo import & face detection
    Upload a selfie; detect the face and landmarks (eyes, lips, jaw) to anchor the retouch tools.
  • Skin smoothing brush
    A finger-paintable smooth/blur brush that evens skin while preserving texture; intensity slider.
  • Blemish remover
    Tap-to-heal spot removal that samples nearby skin - the single most-used retouch action.
  • Whiten & brighten
    Teeth whitening and eye-brighten tools that mask to the detected region automatically.
  • Adjust & filters
    Brightness, contrast, warmth, plus a small set of portrait-flattering filters with before/after compare.
  • Export & paywall
    Free exports carry a watermark or a daily limit; premium removes both and unlocks every tool (RevenueCat / Stripe).
~ 2–4 weeks with AI builders

Full version add later

  • + AI background swap
    Replace or blur the background with a generative or matting API; studio, gradient and scene presets.
  • + Reshape & sculpt
    Liquify-style nudge tool plus jaw/nose/eye sliders driven by face landmarks - the hard, native-leaning feature.
  • + AI portraits / headshots
    Upload a few selfies, generate polished professional headshots via a fine-tune or image API (credit-gated).
  • + Makeup & relight
    Virtual makeup (lips, brows, lashes) and AI relighting that simulates softbox lighting.
  • + Batch & presets
    Save a retouch recipe and apply it to a batch - the pro/creator workflow.
  • + Video touch-up
    Frame-consistent face smoothing for short clips (native or server-side processing).
~ 3–4 months
Architecture

Recommended tech stack

Layer Our pick Why
Client app React Native (Expo) or Swift Manual retouch needs responsive gesture handling on a canvas; Expo + skia covers most of it, Swift/Metal if you want native-grade reshaping.
Image canvas WebGL / Skia (or Core Image on iOS) Brush-based smoothing and adjustments need GPU-accelerated, layered, non-destructive editing - not a plain <canvas>.
Face & matting AI Hosted vision APIs (face landmarks + background matting) Building accurate face-landmark and segmentation models from scratch is a research project; call MediaPipe/Replicate/remove.bg-style APIs and be honest that this is a dependency.
Generative features Replicate / fal.ai image models AI backgrounds and headshot generation run on hosted diffusion models with credit metering - no GPU fleet to own.
Backend & storage Supabase + R2/S3 Store originals and edits, user accounts and credit balances; object storage with cheap egress for images.
Subscriptions RevenueCat Weekly + yearly plans, free trials and paywall A/B tests without writing receipt-validation code.
The payload

AI prompts to clone Facetune

Pick your builder, copy the prompt, paste it and iterate. Enter your email once to unlock all prompts on every page - we'll also send you this full prompt pack.

facetune-lovable.md
Build a selfie retouching web app called Glowtouch, modeled on Facetune.

## Core concept
A focused face-retouch tool, not a general photo editor. Users upload a selfie and improve it with simple finger-friendly tools: smooth skin, remove a blemish, whiten teeth, brighten eyes, swap the background. A free tier exports with a watermark; premium removes it and unlocks AI tools.

## Pages
1. Landing page: a striking before/after slider hero (drag to reveal the retouched face), headline 'Your best selfie, in one tap', email signup CTA, three feature cards, pricing (weekly $4.99 / yearly $29.99 highlighted), FAQ
2. Editor: the heart of the app - uploaded photo centered on a clean canvas, a bottom tool rail (Smooth, Heal, Whiten, Brighten, Background, Adjust, Filters), a tool's intensity slider appears when selected, undo/redo, and a held 'compare' button that shows the original
3. AI Studio: pick a generated background or 'professional headshot' style, runs an image API, shows a credit cost and a result gallery
4. My Photos: grid of saved edits with re-edit and download
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Loadout

Tools to build your Facetune clone

Exit strategy

How to make money with a Facetune clone

01

Pick one photo job, not 'all selfies'

Facetune is general. A clone wins by owning a use case: a dating-profile photo polisher, a LinkedIn-headshot fixer, or a real-estate-agent headshot app. Same tools, sharper positioning, easier ads.

02

Weekly-plus-trial pricing

Facetune's revenue engine is the weekly subscription with a short trial. Price weekly to feel cheap, push the yearly as the obvious save, and obsess over trial-to-paid conversion.

03

AI credits as an upsell tier

Manual retouch is unlimited; gate AI backgrounds and generated headshots behind a credit pack or a higher 'Pro' tier. Generation has real GPU cost, so metering credits protects margin and creates an upsell.

04

B2B headshots for teams

Sell a 'team headshots' bundle to agencies, real-estate brokerages and startups who need consistent profile photos. One B2B order beats dozens of consumer trials.

Intel

Frequently asked questions

How much money does Facetune make?

Third-party estimates put Facetune's app-store consumer spend in the rough range of $8–15 million per month, contributing to Lightricks' reported hundreds of millions in annual revenue across its app suite. Most of it comes from the weekly and yearly subscriptions.

How hard is it to build a Facetune clone?

Medium. A masked smoothing brush, heal tool and basic adjustments are very buildable on a GPU canvas in a few weeks. The genuinely hard parts - accurate face reshaping and clean background matting - are best handled with hosted vision/AI APIs rather than models you train yourself.

Is it legal to clone Facetune?

Building a photo-retouch app is legal - the category is huge and not owned by anyone. What you can't do is copy Facetune's name, logo, screenshots or proprietary code, or imply you're affiliated with Lightricks. Ship your own brand, UI and assets, and respect the licenses of any AI APIs you call.

What tech stack should I use for a retouch app?

A Next.js PWA or React Native (Expo) client, a WebGL/Skia canvas for non-destructive editing, hosted vision APIs for face landmarks and background matting, Replicate or fal for generative features, Supabase for backend and RevenueCat for subscriptions. The prompts on this page scaffold exactly that.

How much does it cost to build and run?

Building is mostly your time plus AI-builder fees. Running costs are dominated by AI inference: face/matting and generation API calls cost real money per image, so meter them with credits. Manual editing runs on-device and is essentially free; image storage and a small backend are a few dollars a month at first.

Do I have to build the AI face and background tech myself?

No - and you shouldn't. Face landmarks, background removal and generative headshots are available as hosted APIs (MediaPipe, remove.bg-style matting, Replicate/fal models). Treat them as dependencies, meter their cost as credits, and design your app so a free user never triggers an expensive call.

Next targets

More apps to clone

CloneMRR is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Facetune. Revenue figures are rough estimates based on public reports and are provided for educational purposes only. "Cloning" here means building an original product inspired by a proven business model - never copy a brand's name, logo, content or code.