I’m Tomislav, the creator of Drawize (10M+ users ). I’m building Drawize Academy: a virtual drawing tutor that gives feedback on your own drawing while you practice—rather than generating art for you. The first lesson is free to try.
Why I built it
Drawing has been part of human culture since the earliest cave paintings, but today it’s hard to get real feedback: schools cut art budgets and private tutoring is expensive. I wanted to see if software could act as a pedagogical coach that helps you improve through practice.
How the feedback works
Rather than sending only the raw canvas, I augment and preprocess the drawing before it goes to the model. The goal is to give the AI clearer context and make feedback more consistent across attempts, without turning this into an image generator.
The philosophy
This is about "Instructional Scaffolding" — building skill through short, guided practice loops and iteration. We focus on the science of Deliberate Practice rather than "matching pixels" or outsourcing the creative work to AI.
Tech
- Backend: C#/.NET API
- Frontend: React
- Model: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview
- Logic Layer: Custom drawing preprocessing and augmentation to minimize LLM spatial hallucinations
Early access
I’m currently at the “first sales” wall for this educational model, so I’m offering Early Access Lifetime Access for $19.50 (one-time payment) to validate demand and fund development.
Feedback I’d love
1. Does the real-time feedback loop help you notice mistakes faster?
2. In a world of generative AI, does learning to draw still feel valuable to you?
3. Does the “coach” feel supportive and actionable, or like a grading algorithm?
Happy to answer questions about the .NET/React implementation, how feedback is generated, and the pedagogy behind the lessons!
Thank you! I am slightly obsessed with optimization, so hearing that means a lot.
You might be surprised — the game is actually deployed in just one region (US) on only two dedicated servers (Contabo).
Here is the breakdown of why it feels fast:
1. The Metal: I use one server for the Web App + Gameplay Backend (.NET), and a second server strictly for PostgreSQL and MongoDB. No virtualization overhead.
2. The Network: I use Cloudflare for static content, which handles the initial global load speed.
3. Aggressive Prefetching: I rely heavily on ServiceWorkers. When you land on the home page, the 'Play' page and game assets are already being prefetched in the background. When you click play, it loads instantly from the local cache.
4. Single WebSocket: Once connected, there is zero HTTP overhead. Every interaction — gameplay, chat, UI updates — travels through a single persistent WebSocket connection.
Keeping the architecture simple (monolith-ish) rather than distributed helps me keep the latency predictable and maintenance low.
Really surprised it's just one application machine I thought it's some microservices thing. I thought one machine would crumble under load. Thanks for answering though.
Modern servers are absolute beasts if you don't bog them down with serialization overhead and network hops between services.
With efficient code in .NET, a single machine can handle such kind of load without breaking a sweat. I actually sleep better knowing there are fewer moving parts to fail!
Thank you! I really appreciate the kind words regarding performance.
Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.
The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.
That’s really awesome to have a viable self bootstrapped project! Did you have to spend a lot of time maintaining it or deal with customer support after the initial launch? A low maintenance yet viable business would truly be the dream!
It is pretty close to that dream scenario now, yes.
Because the tech stack is stable (and fully matured), I almost never have to deal with 'emergency' technical support or bug fixes. The servers just hum along.
I do handle customer support myself, but the volume is very low relative to the traffic. 90% of the tickets are just non-technical questions about billing or ad-free subscriptions.
This low-maintenance overhead is exactly what allows me to work on new features or experiment with new projects (like my upcoming AI drawing school) without burning out.
I’m Tomislav, the creator of Drawize (10M+ users ). I’m building Drawize Academy: a virtual drawing tutor that gives feedback on your own drawing while you practice—rather than generating art for you. The first lesson is free to try.
Why I built it
Drawing has been part of human culture since the earliest cave paintings, but today it’s hard to get real feedback: schools cut art budgets and private tutoring is expensive. I wanted to see if software could act as a pedagogical coach that helps you improve through practice.
How the feedback works
Rather than sending only the raw canvas, I augment and preprocess the drawing before it goes to the model. The goal is to give the AI clearer context and make feedback more consistent across attempts, without turning this into an image generator.
The philosophy
This is about "Instructional Scaffolding" — building skill through short, guided practice loops and iteration. We focus on the science of Deliberate Practice rather than "matching pixels" or outsourcing the creative work to AI.
Tech
- Backend: C#/.NET API
- Frontend: React
- Model: Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview
- Logic Layer: Custom drawing preprocessing and augmentation to minimize LLM spatial hallucinations
Early access
I’m currently at the “first sales” wall for this educational model, so I’m offering Early Access Lifetime Access for $19.50 (one-time payment) to validate demand and fund development.
Feedback I’d love
1. Does the real-time feedback loop help you notice mistakes faster?
2. In a world of generative AI, does learning to draw still feel valuable to you?
3. Does the “coach” feel supportive and actionable, or like a grading algorithm?
Happy to answer questions about the .NET/React implementation, how feedback is generated, and the pedagogy behind the lessons!