Free
$0 forever
- Four machines, always
- No ads, no photo limit
- One of four rotating Pro machines, free each day
- Import from your library
The app is finished · On the App Store in August 2026
Machines, not filters.
A camera app that collects twenty-two machines: film stocks, camcorders, security cameras, night vision, console sensors. You pick one before you shoot.
- 22machines
- 4free forever
Shot with Bengala
The range
Four machines. Nothing in common.
Each one carries its own optics, its own grain and its own way of failing. They share no code path and no colour table. You can see it before you read a word.
The idea
Your camera roll holds forty thousand perfect photos.
Not one of them feels like a memory.
Every one of these machines saw the world wrong in its own specific way. That particular wrongness is what we now recognize as memory.
Same scene
The same frame, one machine apart.
On the left, the untouched photo. On the right, the same frame after one machine had it. Every processed image on this site came out of the color engine that ships in the app — none of them is a mockup.
The collection
Twenty-two machines.
Six are film, rebuilt from spectral data. The other sixteen are capture technologies that were never meant to be beautiful, which is exactly why they are.
Within each family every machine runs on the same photo, so what changes between them is the machine and nothing else. The scene changes from family to family, because a security camera and an infrared film do not have anything to say about the same picture.
Film
Six emulsions rebuilt from spectral datasheets, not eyeballed presets.
6 machines
Night and flash
Four ways of coming home with the night still in the photo. Two of these are film, two are not.
4 machines
Early digital
The first cameras that were not film and not good yet — soft, over-sharpened, and compressed to pieces.
4 machines
Video
Machines that recorded motion, and only accidentally a moment.
2 machines
Game consoles
Sensors and framebuffers with almost no colors to spend.
2 machines
Altered vision
Instruments and processes that record light your eyes never get to see.
4 machines
Twenty-two of these. Four free forever.
See who is making it
August 2026, on iPhone. Nothing to sign up for.
How it works
Choose. Shoot. Wait.
- 01
You choose before you shoot
Not after. Picking the machine is the one decision the app asks you to make, and it asks for it while the moment is still in front of you.
- 02
The viewfinder stays clean
You do not see the result while you frame. That is deliberate. It puts the commitment before the reward, the way a camera with film in it does.
- 03
Then you wait
About two seconds. It is not a loading screen wearing a costume — the photo is genuinely being processed at full resolution. The wait is the product.
Inside the app
Your gallery is a contact sheet.
Photos land in Poptone’s own gallery, not in your camera roll — sprocket holes, a running exposure number, and the machine that took each frame. Export the ones you want, whenever you want.
Under the hood
Color science, not presets.
Anyone can build a look by dragging sliders until it feels right. These were built from measurements.
- 01 3D LUTs from spectral data
- The film machines are built from published spectral response curves, compiled into 33³ lookup tables. Not a color shift approximated by hand.
- 02 Grain that never repeats
- A hand-written Metal kernel generates grain from a deterministic hash, so it never tiles — the previous approach repeated a visible 512-pixel pattern on large photos.
- 03 Halation in linear light
- The glow around bright edges is computed in linear space and converted back, which is where it actually happens on film. A screen blend in gamma looks close and behaves wrong.
- 04 Per-channel tone curves
- Red, green and blue each get their own curve. It is why a cold slide film and a warm negative can share zero structure instead of being the same look, tinted.
What is not here
Your photos are processed on the device and never leave it.
The app makes no network requests of its own, so there is nowhere for them to go. What follows is the rest of what you will not find here — and every line is a decision, not an omission.
- No account, no sign-up, no login
- No wall of generic color presets
- No sliders, no curve panels, no masks. This is not an editor
- No streaks, no daily quests, no notifications saying we miss you
- No third-party analytics and no tracking SDKs — no external dependencies at all
- No ads, in any tier
- No cloud and no sync: not one of your photos ever reaches a server
Pricing
The price, said plainly.
Four machines are free forever, with no ads and no limit on how many photos you take. On top of that, one of four rotating Pro machines unlocks each day, the same one for everybody — the other fourteen only come with a paid plan. If you want all of them, subscribe or pay once.
Poptone Pro
- $1.99 per week
- $3.49 per month
- $11.99 per year
- All twenty-two machines
- Plus every machine added later
- Cancel whenever you want
Founders Lifetime
$19.99
- All twenty-two machines, forever
- And every machine added after that, for free
- No subscription, ever
What you buy stays yours.
Founders Lifetime includes every machine and feature that runs on your device: the ones that exist today and every one added later, free and forever. No cut-off date, nothing to pay again. The only exception is a feature that has to run on a server at a cost per use — image generation, for instance — because every run costs real money; those are offered separately, as optional credits. The rule is simple: if it runs on your phone, it is yours forever.
Prices shown in US dollars. The App Store will show your local price at purchase.
The app is finished. It lands in August 2026.
Built by one person, slowly, on purpose. August 2026, on iPhone — no list to join, nothing to sign up for.
See who is making it
August 2026, on iPhone. Nothing to sign up for.
- iOS 17 or later
- iPhone. There is no iPad version.
- Works entirely offline