Hi. This is Aditya. Time for a real update.
I started building Grabio because every iPhone I owned was choked with utility apps. Twelve of them. A different app for HEIC, another for compressing photos, another for ringtone, another for QR codes, another for “save this thing from the internet”. Each one wanted my email, my notifications, my permissions, and a $5 a month subscription.
I thought: what if all of this just lived inside the iOS share sheet, behind one Apple Shortcut?
That is where Grabio came from.
Where I went wrong
When I shipped the first version, I added a feature called URL Save Media. You would paste a link from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, wherever, and Grabio would save the video for you. It seemed harmless. The Shortcut already had the share-sheet plumbing. Why not?
I did not think hard enough about it.
When I started setting up payments to launch Grabio Pro (the paid tier with higher daily limits), every payment processor I tried declined. Polar.sh, Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, all of them. The reason was the same every time: Visa and Mastercard have brand-level policies against “third-party content downloaders”. My one downloader feature was disqualifying the entire product from accepting payments.
I did not know this when I built it. Honestly. I am a solo developer who taught himself iOS Shortcuts in the evenings after work. I did not read every payment processor’s acceptable use policy before building a feature. That is on me.
So what changed
As of today, Grabio no longer downloads from social media URLs. The URL Save Media feature has been completely removed from the server, from the Shortcut menu, and from every page on the site. If you try to use it with an old version of the Shortcut, you will get a friendly “feature removed, please update” prompt.
To anyone who used Grabio specifically because of that feature, I am sorry. You can still get that workflow elsewhere, just not from me. There are several free tools that do this well. Cobalt.tools is one I would recommend. Snapsave, KeepVid, and others exist. Pick what works for you.
If you ran a small social media management workflow on top of Grabio and you are stuck, email me at [email protected]. If enough people write in with the same need, I might build a separate tool for that under a different brand and a different distribution. No promises. Just open to listening.
What Grabio is now
Grabio is the share-sheet utility your iPhone needed. Twenty-two file utilities, one Apple Shortcut, all from inside the iOS share sheet you already use. No app to install. No login. No tracking.
The features that stayed are the ones I am proudest of:
- Compress any photo, video, or PDF to a specific size. 50KB, 100KB, 200KB, 1MB, or any custom target. Works for government portals, college uploads, visa applications, WhatsApp limits, Gmail caps. Hits the exact size every time.
- Convert HEIC photos to JPG or PNG so your Android friends can actually open them. Batch supported.
- Save any webpage as a clean PDF. Read offline, archive, share. The whole webpage, formatted properly, no ads.
- Remove backgrounds from photos using AI. Etsy-ready, Amazon-ready, Instagram-ready in one tap.
- PDF tools. Combine photos into one PDF, extract pages, delete pages, compress to a target size.
- Live Photo to GIF. Plays in WhatsApp, Telegram, anywhere Live Photos break.
- Strip metadata. EXIF, GPS, location data. Gone before you share.
- QR generator. URL, contact card, WiFi, location. Sharable from your phone in two taps.
Twenty-two utilities total. The free tier gives you 5 actions a day on any of them. That is enough for most people, forever.
Introducing Grabio Pro
Grabio Pro is $3 a month. It lifts your daily limit from 5 actions to 30. That is it. No locked features, no Pro-only modes, no “premium” version of anything. The Pro tier just removes the daily friction.
I wish I could keep it all free. I really do. Here is why I cannot.
Every Grabio action runs on a server I rent in Germany. Compression uses ffmpeg, which means CPU time. Background removal uses an AI model called rembg that I host myself, which means heavy compute on every request. Saving a webpage as PDF spins up a real headless Chrome instance to render the page. These cost money. Server bills do not pause.
If I let the free tier run wild, the server crashes under load and the product quietly dies. The 5-actions-per-day cap is the only thing that lets me serve thousands of users on a single rented box. Pro at $3 is the difference between Grabio existing in twelve months and Grabio quietly going offline because I could not pay for it.
Three dollars a month also means I do not need investors. I do not need ads. I do not need to sell your data. I do not need to harvest your contacts to keep the lights on. You pay me a fair price for a useful tool, and I keep building it.
If you have been using Grabio for free, keep using it. The free tier is not going anywhere. If you hit the 5 a day cap and Grabio is useful enough that you would pay a small amount to use it more, Pro is there. grabio.adityaarsharma.com/#pricing
What I learned, in case you are building something
- Read every payment processor’s acceptable use policy before you ship the first version. Even Stripe’s. Even PayPal’s. Save yourself months of rebuilding.
- The feature you think is the killer wedge is not always the one you should build. The social downloader was a great wedge. It was also a legal landmine. The boring features (compress, convert, PDF) are the ones that actually scale.
- Going legit early is cheaper than going legit late. Every workaround I considered cost more than just deleting the feature.
- Indie developers do not have a great rule book for this stuff. I am writing some of it as I go in public. If you are in a similar spot, my email is at the bottom of this post.
What is next
The 22 features I have now are the launch. The roadmap from here is making the share-sheet utility better:
- More compression presets for specific platforms and portals
- AI photo restore and AI upscale
- OCR (extract text from any image or PDF)
- Smart workflows you can chain together
- Better support for sharing back into your favorite apps
I will write each one up when it ships.
Try it
Free, no login, iOS only. grabio.adityaarsharma.com
If you bought into Grabio for the downloader and you are disappointed, I get it. Send me an email. If you have never tried Grabio, the file utilities are genuinely good. Compress is the one that wins people over.
Thanks for reading. And thanks for sticking around through the change.
Aditya
[email protected]
