My name is Vladimir Romanov, and we created StickerKat — a tool for automatic vectorization of contours for plotter and laser cutting. Below I'll tell you where the idea came from and what gap in processes we closed.

Where the pain came from

From the outside, everything looks elementary: the client sent a picture — the printing house printed stickers. But between "sent" and "printed" lies a technological chasm that customers don't even suspect.

For a plotter or laser to cut a sticker exactly along the shape, the production needs a vector contour — a closed line with an offset of about 4 mm from the edge of the image. And now pay attention: 90% of clients send ordinary raster files — JPG, PNG, screenshots from messengers, layouts from Canva and Figma. These are pixels, but the machine needs curves.

Standard tracers handle the task formally: they trace the image along the contour, but do it roughly. Every semi-transparent pixel becomes a separate node, corners break, curves turn into polylines. As a result, a prepress operator or designer opens Illustrator, takes the pen, and manually cleans hundreds of garbage points, smooths lines, and adds a technological offset. And so on — with every layout.

The output quality depends on the mood and fatigue of a particular person. Operators at the reception often don't have the necessary level of tool proficiency, and in-house designers burn out from monotonous work. The consequence is defects that are discovered only after cutting: the cut line went sideways, part of the image was cut off, the client receives a sticker with a cut-off ear or half a letter. This means rework, missed deadlines, loss of money and reputation. Plus, knives dull faster, equipment resources are wasted.

A separate story is files from Figma and Canva. When imported into CorelDRAW or Illustrator, the layout often shifts, elements disappear, fonts turn into gibberish. This is usually discovered at the print output stage, when it's too late to redo.

Why ready-made solutions don't solve the problem

Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Professional editors can trace raster to vector, but require the operator to understand Bezier curves, nodes, tangents. The average printing house employee doesn't have this skill — and shouldn't, it's not their profile. Processing one file takes 10-20 minutes, and without a guarantee of result. Plus, the software is pirated, updates are not installed, specialists age and leave, new ones struggle with a twenty-year-old interface.

Freelance exchanges. You can outsource the task, but it breaks the flow. Long approvals, varying levels of performers, lack of a unified quality standard. You can't hire enough freelancers for 30 layouts a day.

Online converters. There are few of them, and they all work on the same principle: upload a file — get a result without the ability to influence the process. You can't adjust the contour thickness, DPI, offset for a specific plotter. It's a lottery where defects are a statistical inevitability.

The market is stuck between "fast and crooked" and "high quality but expensive and slow." There is no third option.

What we did

We got tired of it and built our own tool.

During design, we deliberately abandoned the idea of making "another graphic editor." Instead, we focused on one narrow task — mathematically precise vectorization with generation of a clean contour without garbage nodes. Everything that doesn't affect this task was ruthlessly discarded: no layers, masks, color correction, effects. Only what production needs.

How it works in practice: upload a file in any common format (JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, EPS, SVG), the service automatically detects the object, removes the background, and builds a vector contour. The interface offers three key parameters — accuracy, smoothing, and technological offset for cutting. That's it, everything else happens automatically.

The main advantage is instant preview. You immediately see what the cut line will look like, where the boundaries will go, whether there are intersections and narrow spots. Notice a problem — adjust the slider, see the result, download the finished file. The output is SVG or PDF with clean contours. For batch processing, a ZIP archive is provided.

Additionally, you can set the CMYK color model, PDF page layout, and contour thickness — so the file goes to production without additional preparation. If the automatic tracing is not perfect, you can refine the contour in an editor in minutes, not hours — the quality geometry is already in place.

Demonstration of StickerKat in action

Counting the money

Let's take a typical printing house with a flow of 30 layouts per day. If preparing each file takes 15 minutes, that's 7.5 hours of pure work per shift. At a designer's rate of 200 rubles per hour, that's 33,000 rubles per month — just for contour tracing, not counting defects and rework.

With our service, one file takes up to 60 seconds. 30 layouts — that's 30 minutes per day. The difference is obvious.

How much does it cost

Free mode — 5 processes per week, enough to see if the tool suits you.

Token pack — 100 processes for 990 rubles. Enough for about a month of work for a small printing house.

PRO subscription — unlimited for 590 rubles per month when paid annually.

Pricing is flexible, we adapt to the volume and needs of a specific client. We can discuss individual terms.

Conclusion

We didn't invent a new market — that's a whole different level of money and time. Instead, we precisely solved a specific technical problem: preparing files for contour cutting. Now this operation doesn't need to be done manually. Operators work without deep knowledge of vector editors, printing houses get consistent results and fewer defects, clients get neat stickers without cut-off corners.

Fully domestic development. You can try it at stickercut.ru.

We are open to dialogue and always happy to discuss the challenges of the printing industry. Write, call, come with cases — we'll figure it out together.