01

Today I wanted to make a cover image for my WeChat public account. The portrait generated by AI did not really look like me. I tried two versions and still was not satisfied, so I wanted to quickly test a face-swap tool.

I searched on Google, opened the site ranking first, and tried it.

Maybe because the photo was a side profile, the result had flaws. But then I suddenly remembered hearing that some developers had their payment accounts banned for building face-swap tools. So I became curious: what payment method does the top-ranking site actually use?

After all, with this much traffic and an average visit duration close to 3 minutes, it must be making money. Otherwise, the maker would probably have given up long ago.

Then I saw it: Telegram and cryptocurrency.

I do not have Telegram installed, so I did not continue.

02

Looking at that payment screen, I thought: this founder is pretty smart. He found another path.

But more likely, he was forced into it. He probably went through something, or he clearly understands how strict Stripe, Creem, and similar payment platforms can be toward the face-swap category. That may be why he ended up here.

At the same time, I also think payment platforms are too blunt in how they handle this.

Face swapping itself is neutral. It is not automatically inappropriate or problematic just because it is called "face swapping."

Especially after AI became common, if an AI-generated portrait does not look like you and you want to replace it with your own face, where exactly is the infringement?

The key is the user's intent: are they trying to solve a real problem for themselves, or are they maliciously defaming and fabricating things about other people?

This dual-use nature is actually very common.

Photoshop can be used to edit photos, and it can also be used to fake things. But it has always been able to live within compliant payment channels.

AI tools are the same. They can help people solve problems, and they can also be misused to build illegal software. But a tool is neutral. Good or evil belongs to the person using it.

When it comes to AI face swapping, because the phrase "face swap" sounds somewhat sensitive, the entire category gets treated with a broad brush.

But a tool is still a tool. How it is used is up to the person using it.

03

Over the past few months, I have been paying close attention to payment-related information. The more I read, the more I feel that what indie developers can and cannot build is often not decided by the developers themselves. Payment platforms decide it for you.

Once a category is placed on a payment platform's high-risk list, even legitimate needs have to take a detour.

What makes it harder is that many developers only get banned after they have already built the thing. The product is live. Users are using it. Revenue starts to stabilize. Then one day, an email arrives: the account is frozen, and funds are held for 90 days or even longer. All the previous effort gets paused overnight.

That anxiety is specific to indie developers.

When you are employed, if the company collapses, you can go find another job.

When you are building your own product, if the payment channel breaks, the lifeline of the whole business breaks.

You can appeal, but there may be no result. The terms are written clearly, and the platform reserves the final right of interpretation.

So when this face-swap founder ended up using Telegram, it may not have been an active choice. It feels more like he was pushed there step by step. Maybe he also wanted to use Stripe properly, issue invoices, and run subscriptions in a normal way. But that road may never have been open to him from the beginning.

In the end, I did not keep looking for a face-swap tool. I finished the cover image another way.

But the moment I opened that payment page, I felt like I roughly understood how that founder had made it through the past few years.