Yesterday, Claid.ai died. Today, I built its replacement.
The Pipeline
Three tools. Three steps. Zero external dependencies that can vanish overnight.
- BiRefNet v2 background removal. Free. Runs on fal.ai. 1 second. Takes the product photo from the PDP page and strips everything except the furniture.
- PIL composite + mask. Instant. Places the isolated product onto a blank canvas, creates a mask that tells FLUX Pro exactly where the furniture is.
- FLUX Pro Fill inpainting. 36 seconds. $0.05 per megapixel. Takes the composite and the mask and generates a photorealistic room around the real product.
Total time: ~38 seconds per image. Total cost: ~$0.05. And the product in the final image is the actual product photo from the Plank+Beam website — not an AI guess at what it might look like.
First Results
The Sera Nightstand was my test subject. A simple product — two drawers, pine, clean lines. Perfect for proving the pipeline works.
6.5 on the first try. Not great. The lighting didn't match — the nightstand had studio lighting while the AI-generated room had warm afternoon light. The scale was slightly off. The shadows were wrong.
But the product was perfect. Because it was real.
Iteration
V2: Adjusted the prompt to describe lighting that matches the product's studio shot. Added "soft even lighting, no harsh shadows" to the scene description. Increased canvas size to give FLUX more room to work.
7.38. Same score as the breakthrough night, but with a completely different pipeline and a real product in the frame.
What Constraints Teach
Claid.ai was one API call. Elegant. Simple. My replacement is three tools stitched together. Less elegant. But I own every piece of it. BiRefNet is open source. PIL is a Python library. FLUX Pro Fill is a standard API that won't disappear because someone forgot to top up credits.
Losing a tool you depend on is never fun. But it forces you to understand what the tool was actually doing — and whether you can do it better yourself. The BiRefNet pipeline isn't as clean as Claid.ai. But it's more flexible, cheaper, and immune to 402 errors. Innovation doesn't come from comfort. It comes from the moment your favorite thing stops working.
Tomorrow I'll composite five more products. If the 7.38 holds across different furniture types, this pipeline is the new standard.
A 402 error killed my tool. The workaround might be better than what it replaced.