Built by a collector, for collectors

The Story

I've been collecting games for years — mostly PS2 and original Xbox titles, with a smaller DVD movie collection on the side. The problem with collecting at scale is that cases get destroyed long before the discs do. Sun-faded inserts, water damage, ex-rental stickers that take half the artwork off when you peel them, missing covers entirely on loose-disc copies you bought at a market stall. Buying replacement cases doesn't fix the cover; you still need the artwork.

So I started doing what most collectors do: tracking down high-resolution scans, opening Photoshop, manually pasting front and back panels onto a blank canvas, eyeballing the spine width, exporting, printing, finding I'd got the dimensions wrong, going back, fixing it, and printing again. Doable for one cover. Painful for ten. Genuinely not worth it for fifty.

The tools that already existed online were either: (a) buried inside enormous design suites that required signups and accounts, (b) dedicated cover-printing services that wanted you to upload your scans to their servers and pay them to print and ship the result, or (c) abandoned web tools from 2009 that didn't work in modern browsers. None of them did the simple thing I wanted: take three image files (front, spine, back), arrange them at the correct dimensions for the case format, and give me a single print-ready file back. So I built that.

CoverStitch is the tool I wished existed when I was reprinting my fiftieth PS2 cover. It does one thing: combines your front, back, and (optionally) spine images into a print-ready full cover wrap, sized exactly right for the case format you choose. It runs entirely in your browser, never uploads your images anywhere, and is completely free. There's no signup. There's no upgrade tier. There's no "premium" version.

The Principles Behind It

I think a lot of small web tools are over-engineered, over-monetized, and over-eager to harvest user data. CoverStitch is built around three principles that push the other direction:

Privacy-first browser tools have a quiet renaissance happening right now — small utilities that do useful work entirely in the browser, without sending data anywhere, without requiring accounts. Tools like Squoosh for image compression, Picular for colour palettes, RegExr for regex testing. CoverStitch is part of that same wave. The internet doesn't have to be a series of accounts you log into to do simple things — modern browsers are powerful enough to run real applications locally, and that's where this tool lives.

What Makes CoverStitch Different

There are a handful of other cover-stitching tools out there. Here's how CoverStitch is genuinely different:

The Technology

CoverStitch is intentionally simple. It's a single HTML file with embedded CSS and JavaScript — no React, no build system, no Node.js dependencies. The whole tool is around 60KB of source code that loads instantly and runs anywhere a modern browser does.

All image processing — resizing each panel to the correct preset dimensions, combining front/spine/back side-by-side onto a single canvas, exporting as PNG or JPG — is done client-side using the standard browser Canvas API. The same APIs that power every photo-editing tool on the web, just used for one specific job. The simplicity is the point: there's no infrastructure to fail, no account system to maintain, no database to keep secure. It just works.

The site is hosted on Netlify's free tier behind Cloudflare DNS, which together comfortably handle the traffic and cost essentially nothing to run. There's no analytics that tracks you individually — just basic Google Analytics for understanding which pages get visited. The full tool runs every time you load the page, with no state stored between sessions.

The Commitment to Free

I'll be direct: CoverStitch will never have a paid tier. The whole premise is that a tool this simple shouldn't cost anything. Hosting is essentially free at this scale (static files served from a CDN), and a single unobtrusive ad on the page covers what little it does cost. If the tool ever becomes popular enough that hosting costs grow significantly, the answer is more ads — never paywalls, never premium presets, never "remove watermark for $5."

The closest thing to monetization on the page is one Google AdSense unit. That's it. No affiliate links pushing you to specific paper or printers. No upsells. No data brokerage. The tool exists because I needed it, and keeping it free is the easiest way to make sure it stays useful to other collectors who need it too.

I'd Love Your Feedback

If you've used CoverStitch and have thoughts — features that would help your workflow, case formats that aren't supported, dimensions that don't match your specific cases, bugs you've hit — I genuinely want to hear about them. The tool is small and I can usually ship a fix or a new feature within a few days. Find me on the contact page with bug reports, feature requests, dimension corrections, and anything else.

If you've found CoverStitch useful, the best thing you can do is tell another collector. Word of mouth from people who actually use the tool reaches the right audience — collectors who are frustrated with their existing options and would benefit from a simpler one. There's no "share" button on the page deliberately. If it's worth sharing, you'll know how.