Vireeel is an iOS app for making and sharing GIFs and memes, running AI photo tools, and posting into social rooms. It started life as a browser GIF maker and shipped to the App Store as a full React Native app. Almost everything is free, and credits apply only to the AI image generations. There is no subscription. The story of how it actually got out the door is in the launch write-up.

Discover

Trending GIFs and memes on the home feed, with a toggle between GIFs and memes and between sources
Search, category pills, and infinite scroll with pull to refresh
Tap anything for a full-size preview with Save to the photo library and Edit
Previously loaded content is cached in SQLite for offline viewing

On-device studios

GIF Studio: text overlays, stickers, drawing, crop and resize, filters, and speed
Meme Studio: text and stickers with full control over font, color, and size
Camera capture straight into GIF, meme, or video mode
All of it runs on the device through FFmpeg Kit, uses no credits, and never uploads unless you share

AI tools

The Create tab is the credit-powered shelf. Each tool takes a photo and returns a transformed version:

Imagine for art styles, Couples, Glow Up, and Makeup for photo transformations
Dream for multi-image editing, Lmaoji for emoji stickers of a face, travel tools that drop you into a scene
Photo Studio: Hair Change, Headshot Pro, Photo FX, Photo Restoration, Portrait Enhance, Relighting

Because these send the selected image to third-party AI providers, the first use of any AI tool shows a data-use disclosure the user must accept, enforced across every tool. Each tool shows its credit cost before it runs.

Browse rooms by category and city, create a room from an image or a link, and comment
Images are AI-scanned for inappropriate content before posting, and links are validated
Heavily reported comments are hidden automatically, and users can report content and behavior

Monetization

Free by default: browsing, search, saving, the on-device editors, the camera, joke cards, and the chat helper
Credits are consumable in-app purchase packs (small, medium, large) used only for AI generations
No subscription, and no paywall in onboarding

Stack

App: React Native and Expo, TypeScript, Expo Router
Media: FFmpeg Kit for on-device video and GIF processing, Expo Camera and Media Library
Local data: SQLite for the GIF cache and user content, AsyncStorage for preferences
Auth: Firebase (Apple, Google, and email sign-in)
Cloud: Cloudflare R2 for storage, D1 for metadata, and Workers for processing
Content: Tenor for GIF and meme discovery, Gemini for AI frame generation

Why I built it

GIF and AI-photo apps are a crowded category, and I spent months trying to out-build the incumbents on features before changing tack. The answer was not more surface area. It was to make the creative tools free where they should be free, charge only for the AI generations that cost real money to run, keep the on-device work private, and ship.