I Built an AI Headshot Generator in 48 Hours - Here's What I Learned

I wanted professional headshots for a LinkedIn profile update. The quotes I got back were insane - £50-150 per session, 1-2 week wait, editing fees on top. So I built my own solution instead. Here's what 48 hours of building looked like, and what actually worked. The idea Simple: upload one photo, pay £4.99, get a studio-quality professional headshot in 30 seconds. No subscription. No monthly fee. One payment, one headshot. The target user is obvious - anyone who needs a LinkedIn photo but doesn't want to pay a photographer £100 for the privilege. The stack AI generation : FLUX model via fal.ai API. It's genuinely impressive for portrait work. Fast and the quality holds up. Payments : Stripe. Standard checkout flow, webhook to confirm payment before delivering the image. Frontend : Simple, minimal. Upload form → payment → result. No account required. Hosting : Netlify. Deployed in about 20 minutes. What I got wrong first I launched with no before/after examples on the page. Zero. Just