Who we are, in one breath

We’re three friends—two ex-design-studio nerds and one frontend guy who still quotes 2009-era memes—running alfalahpublisher.com from a dusty attic in Amman. Our day jobs used to be “make banner ads load 0.3 seconds faster.”

Why we picked images first

Images are the elephants in every webpage’s room. They look gentle, then they stomp on your Lighthouse score. Clients kept asking us: “Can you shrink this 8 MB hero photo without making my product look like Minecraft?” We got tired of answering, “Pay ninety-nine bucks a year for software that still watermarks your cat.” So we coded Compress Image in a weekend, fueled by shawarma and very cheap coffee. It worked. Word spread. Suddenly we had traffic from places I still can’t pronounce.

Compress Image – the gateway drug

Drag, drop, done. No sign-up, no “create your profile,” no creepy pixel tracking. Behind the curtain we bundle mozjpeg, oxipng, and a couple of tricks we stole from WhatsApp’s Android client. Average savings? 74 %. I still remember the first email we got: “You rescued my thesis from university upload limits. I graduated because of you.” That felt better than any A/B-test win I ever presented to a CEO.

Resize Image – because “just use CSS” is a lie

Designers lie. They swear “we’ll never need a 4K version,” then the client opens the site on a 5k Retina and suddenly it’s our fault the logo looks fuzzy. Our Resize tool spits out exact dimensions: 512, 768, 1024, 2048, plus the weird 1.85:1 film ratio nobody uses but one guy in Chile desperately needed. You can lock aspect, add padding the color of your ex’s heart (hex #263238), or crop by focal point. We even keep the original EXIF—photographers get weirdly emotional about GPS coordinates of abandoned gas stations.

Convert Image – the diplomatic translator

WebP fanboys fight AVIF evangelists in Twitter threads that read like Star Wars subtitles. Meanwhile normal people just want their transparent PNG to become a JPEG without looking like it sunbathed too long. Our Convert tab supports WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, and that creaky TIFF your scanner still births. Side-by-side preview, 60 fps slider, file-size delta in red/green. I’ve seen users spend twenty minutes sliding back and forth, hypnotized. It’s free therapy.

No paywall, no venture capital, no existential crisis

We fund the servers by selling a $3 ebook on color theory. That’s it. No “freemium,” no “upgrade to pro,” no dark-pattern countdown timer screaming “Only 2 compressions left!” We tried the donation button—three bucks arrived, then someone from Lagos sent us a poem instead of cash. Honestly, the poem felt richer.

Speed is our religion, but beauty is the prayer

Every tool is a single HTML page. No React, no 12-MB vendor bundle. We hand-write CSS like it’s 2004 and we still believe in marquees. Largest Contentful Paint clocks at 0.9 s on a 3G connection from rural Jordan. Google claps, users stay, our moms finally understand what we do.

Privacy in two words: “We forget.”

Your file hits our RAM, gets transformed, rides back to you, then evaporates. Nothing touches disk, nothing reaches logging, nothing trains an AI that will eventually enslave humanity. We wrote that sentence in the privacy policy; the lawyer sighed, then smiled for the first time since law school.

Real-life chaos, real-life fixes

Last April a travel blogger uploaded 400 safari photos at once. Our fan spun so hard the server literally slid off the shelf and yanked the ethernet cable. Site went 404 for seven minutes. We sat on the floor, laughing like idiots, rebooted, added a queue system the same night. Now the tool politely says, “Hold your horses, 23 images left.” Users think we’re polite; we just don’t want another workout chasing cables.

Micro-opinion corner

I personally hate sharpen filters. They make every selfie look like it’s been stabbed by tiny glass knives. Our resize algorithm does zero sharpening unless you toggle “fake crisp” on purpose. Toggle at your own moral peril.

Roadmap scribbled on a pizza box

• Background Remover (beta smells like 87 % done)
• Batch rename by EXIF date (because your DCS0001.jpg nonsense drives me insane)
• A drag-and-drop CLI for terminal nerds who refuse to leave their dark themes
• Dark mode for the site itself—yeah, yeah, we’re late, I know

The accidental community

We never built a forum, yet users started mailing us wedding invitations, DSLR recommendations, even a recipe for maqluba. One guy asked if we could add a “compress my mother-in-law” button. We replied, “Legal says no.” He sent laughing emojis and a photo of knafeh. That’s the brand now: pixels, pastries, and polite rebellion.

How to reach actual humans

hello@alfalahpublisher.com lands in my pocket. I read every line, usually at 2 a.m. while my newborn practices opera. If you complain, I fix; if you praise, I forward to mom; if you spam, I cry quietly.

The cheesy wrap-up we promised ourselves we’d avoid

share them, curse at them when they break, then tell us so we improve. That loop—build, share, fix, repeat—is the closest thing to magic we’ve found that doesn’t require a credit card.