One Person, Five Years of Persistence: From Open Source to Profitability
2025-10-31 "Five Years of Effort, All for Letting Every Pixel Grow Freely"
💡 1. The Birth of LeaferJS
In the spring of 2021, I wrote the first line of code for LeaferJS.
I wanted to build an open-source graphics engine that could handle millions of elements while remaining smooth, making design and graphic editing more fluid.
I hoped it could support professional creative tools at the level of Adobe and Figma, allowing frontend developers to fully unleash their creativity.
At the time, this idea sounded a bit crazy, but after five years of effort, it is gradually turning from a dream into reality.
You can think of a graphics engine as a powerful car engine that drives the entire creative tool, making creation as smooth as driving a luxury car.
⚙️ 2. Why Do This?
I have seen too many companies fall into the trap of building graphical products—including myself.
They were building design tools, whiteboards, video editors, posters, illustrations, UI prototypes, presentations, flowcharts, mind maps, as well as systems for power, water, transportation, aviation, energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and IoT monitoring.
Across different industries, everyone faces the same difficult problems: performance lag, long development cycles, and high costs.
It’s like driving a car with a shaky engine, unresponsive throttle, and limited speed—you can’t move forward efficiently.
I remember when we were building an online whiteboard, we had to develop new features while constantly optimizing performance. Since there were no ready-made high-performance solutions or professional graphic editing plugins in the market, every company had to reinvent the wheel.
Building a high-performance, feature-rich graphics engine often requires tens of millions in team investment, and those who succeed usually keep it closed to maintain a competitive advantage.
Seeing this pain point sparked a thought in me—
I want to change all of this, so developers can build professional creative tools as easily as assembling building blocks.
🏃♂️ 3. Persistence with No Way Back
During those years, I had almost no income.
After my savings ran out, I relied on family, friends, and even loans to cover living expenses and server costs. I wrote engine architecture during the day, debugged rendering logic at night, and when exhausted, I would sleep briefly on the keyboard before continuing to code.
No team, no funding—the only thing sustaining me was a burning belief—
The world needs such a graphics engine. And I will not let it be absent.
🔥 4. Successful Release
After three years, through countless days and nights of development, refactoring, and rebuilding, I watched memory usage gradually decrease and features steadily improve. Eventually, the product was successfully released and sparked strong reactions in the frontend community.
More and more users joined, and the LeaferJS community grew from one person into a group. The number of chat groups expanded from one to seven.
Today, many developers use LeaferJS to build their own “cars”—
Some use it to create design tools, whiteboards, video editors, animations, and games, while others use it for roads, subways, tunnels, containers, drones, and IoT monitoring systems. More people contribute plugins, examples, and ideas, continuously expanding the ecosystem.
Some enthusiastic creators even started recommending LeaferJS on their own—making videos and writing articles—helping spread it to more people. For the first time, I truly felt the power of open source—
It doesn’t belong to me—it belongs to everyone who believes in it.
When many users described it as “easy to use,” I felt proud and realized its true value—it genuinely helps people, making their creations smoother and their lives a bit easier.
🚀 5. From Open Source to Sustainability
Later, I saw the success of DeepSeek. With strong product capability and community power, it spread globally without much promotion. That made me realize:
To make LeaferJS truly go far, we must build a great product while aligning with the urgent needs of the current era.
I began to rethink my priorities. Building top-tier performance plugins became essential. At the same time, I considered sustainability. Relying solely on sponsorship is difficult—without income, continuous development would eventually become unsustainable.
So I founded a new company, “PxGrow”, to provide professional-grade graphics plugins and services for enterprises—using commercial success to support open source and ensure long-term sustainability.
⚡ 6. Ignite Creativity with Performance
At the request of users, we developed our first commercial plugin, “Crop Master”, which has already helped multiple companies quickly implement image cropping interactions.
Next, we will release the “Performance Plugin Series”—high-performance tools that many users have been eagerly waiting for.
They can improve rendering speed by several times or even dozens of times, allowing ultra-large files and complex projects to run smoothly. What once caused severe lag can now be smoothly zoomed and edited even on ordinary computers.
It’s like installing a high-performance engine into your creative tools—no matter how complex the design, everything runs smoothly.
🎯 If you’ve ever been frustrated by performance issues, feel free to visit www.PxGrow.com to learn more.
🌍 7. Future Plans
We will continue moving forward.
🧩 Build a Community Support Team We will recruit community members to create more discussion groups, help new users, write tutorials, and translate documentation—making it easier for more people to get started. In the future, we will also form a core product team from active contributors.
💎 Establish a Contributor Membership System Core features will remain open source, while some enhanced plugins will be prioritized for paid members. After stabilization (3–6 months), we will gradually open-source them—community team members can use them for free.
🛒 Build an Online Plugin and Product Marketplace Connecting developers and users, enriching the ecosystem. Developers can earn returns, users can save time, and society avoids redundant work.
This process is like building an automotive industry chain—from engine to full vehicle, from components to market. Every link requires more participation and contribution to make creativity truly land and grow sustainably.
🌱 8. Pixels (Tree) Growing
LeaferJS is more than just an engine—it is a growing ecosystem that nurtures countless ideas, products, and dreams. Over the past five years, I have carefully cultivated it.
With the arrival of the AI era, new ideas, graphics, and intelligent applications are emerging and evolving at an unprecedented speed.
🌟 I hope that in the future, when you see a smooth and powerful creative tool, LeaferJS might be behind it.
🚀 Final Words
The journey of entrepreneurship is tough—filled with countless hardships and endless effort. But it is this persistence that allowed me to see the value of hard work and stay driven by a mission that gives life meaning. More importantly, these efforts truly help others—making their creative processes smoother and their work and life easier.
If this story resonates with you, please share it with more people—so those in need can avoid detours, and more creators can find their own stage 🎨.
Support LeaferJS, and support a belief that has never given up for five years.
Open Source Website: www.leaferjs.com