Why we built Cleanr instead of building another Lightroom

The moment we decided not to chase Lightroom

When we started MRVL, I spent weeks testing what photographers and everyday users actually wanted. The pattern was clear. People didn't want to spend two hours learning curves and HSL panels. They wanted to take a photo on their iPhone, make it look good in 30 seconds, and move on. Lightroom is built for photographers who want granular control. That's a real use case. But it's not everyone's use case.

We also noticed something else. Lightroom's free tier is generous with what you can see, but stingy with what you can do. Three edits a day before the subscription kicks in. Three background removals a month. Adjust one slider and you're nudged toward the monthly plan. That friction bothered us. Not as a business model question, but as a design one. Why build in frustration?

What Cleanr does that Lightroom Mobile doesn't

Lightroom is the world's best raw adjustment engine. Full stop. If you shoot RAW files and want to tweak tone curves, recover shadow detail, or nail white balance on a studio shot, Lightroom is the obvious choice. We're not competing there.

But Lightroom doesn't have object removal. It doesn't remove blemishes automatically. It doesn't restore your grandmother's old black and white photo and colourize it in seconds. It doesn't swap a dull sky for a golden hour sky with one tap. Lightroom also doesn't have batch processing on the free tier, no generative fill to rebuild parts of an image, and no portrait blur that just works without you learning how masks function.

Where Lightroom makes you think step by step, Cleanr does the thinking. Auto-enhance reads your photo and fixes exposure, colour, and sharpness all at once. One tap. Sky replacement gives you six presets (Blue Day, Golden Hour, Sunset, Dusk, Overcast, Stormy) instead of asking you to find and blend a stock image. The workflow is different because the goal is different. You're not trying to perfect a craft. You're trying to make a photo look professional in less time than it takes to write a caption.

The watermark question, and why we don't have one

This might sound small. It's not. The first decision we made about the free tier was to not watermark exports. Ever. On any tier, on any plan. Lightroom Mobile doesn't watermark either, but plenty of competitors do, and it creates this weird incentive: the app tries to upsell you to remove the watermark it added. We found that gross.

The free version of Cleanr isn't designed to be a trial. It's designed to be genuinely useful. You get three auto-enhancements a day, three background removals, object removal, restoration, sky replacement, all the frames, access to our Faith Mode presets if you're a Christian creator, and no watermark. The limits exist so we can keep the servers running without charging everyone. They don't exist to annoy you into paying.

If you want unlimited edits, batch processing, or our Pro tools like selective adjustments and generative fill, the subscription exists. Cleanr Plus is £3.99 a month or £29.99 a year. Lightroom Mobile is £4.99 a month or £49.99 a year. We're cheaper. But that's not the point. The point is honesty. We built the free tier to be the real product, not a demo.

Who actually picks Cleanr

Lightroom appeals to photographers. Cleanr appeals to the people Lightroom ignores. Faith creators posting on Instagram. Small shop owners editing product photos for Shopify. Anyone who's scrolled through their camera roll and thought, 'This could be better, but I don't have time for software.' These are people who aren't going to learn adjustment layers or colour science. They just want their photo to look like they meant to take it that way.

We built Faith Mode specifically for Christian creators because that's our own community. Warm presets tuned for indoor lighting and skin tones, scripture overlays that fit your message, the whole thing designed by people who actually post to Instagram Stories on Sunday mornings. It sounds niche. It is niche. But niches are where you build real loyalty because you're solving a problem nobody else cares about.

The secondary audience is people angry at subscriptions. We've had messages from folks who tried five different apps, hit paywalls in each one, and landed on Cleanr because they wanted to know up front what they get for free. That's not a marketing pitch. That's trust, earned by not playing games.

The technical bet we made

Lightroom syncs to the cloud and ties you to Adobe's ecosystem. We chose a different path. Cleanr runs almost entirely on device. Your iPhone processes the background removal. Your phone does the sky replacement, the object removal, the face detection for blemish correction. Cloud sync exists if you want it (on Plus and above), but the app works offline. You own your edit history locally. That means faster processing, no waiting for cloud computation, and privacy by default.

The other bet was breadth over depth. Lightroom goes very deep on one thing (RAW editing). We built 22 different tools because real life doesn't fit one genre. You need object removal for the Instagram post, batch processing for ten product shots, old photo restoration for your mum's wedding album, and portrait blur for the headshot. So we built all of it. Not as well as Lightroom's RAW tools (nothing is), but well enough that you don't need five apps.

The honest gap

Lightroom is better if you care about technical precision. If you shoot RAW, Lightroom is the only sane choice. We're not competing for that user. We're competing for everyone else. And when everyone else picks us, it's because they tried Lightroom, found it too complex or too expensive for what they needed, and wanted something that just works.

Some of our Pro features (HSL colour, tone curves, selective brush adjustments) do tread closer to what Lightroom offers. But even there, the philosophy is different. Our tone curves are there if you want them, not required if you don't. Our face retouch is automatic or manual. We don't make you become a colorist to edit a photo.