Quick backstory: my wife loves trying new nail designs, but every appointment is a real commitment of time and money, and she'd often leave the salon with something that looked great in the reference photo but didn't quite work on her actual hands. Skin tone, hand shape, nail length, all of it changes how a design reads. So she'd scroll through hundreds of inspo pics and still end up second-guessing.
I built NailChrome to fix that. You take a photo of your hand, browse a library of designs (solid colors, French tips, patterns, nail art, seasonal collections), tap one, and the AI applies it realistically to your actual nails in a few seconds. You can save favorites and show them to your nail tech so you walk in knowing exactly what you want.
A few things worth sharing for anyone here thinking about a similar build:
On the design side: this was the hardest part for me by far. I'm a developer, not a designer, and a beauty app lives or dies by how it looks. The bar for visual polish is way higher than anything I'd built before, and I spent a lot more time on UI than I expected. Still iterating on it honestly.
On monetization: new users get 2 free AI generations, then it's credit packs. No subscription. I went back and forth on this a lot. Subscriptions are the obvious move for retention but felt wrong for an app you might use in bursts (before an appointment, then not again for a month). Curious if anyone here has data on credits vs subscription for similar use cases.
On the AI angle: I'm a bit tired of "AI for everything" apps too, but this is one of those cases where the tech genuinely solves a problem that wasn't solvable before. You really can't preview a nail design on your own hand any other way without painting it.
Live now on the App Store. Would love feedback from this community, especially on the listing, screenshots, or anything you'd change about the positioning.
https://apps.apple.com/mx/app/nailchrome/id6761668612?l=en-GB