Pacing Headshots

Pacing Headshots is for us and for clients who need a headshot this week without a studio day, and without handing faces to a site we know nothing about. It lives at headshots.pacing.agency.

It started as a fork of Astria's open-source headshots starter. We customised it, moved it onto our own server and, on 7 October 2026, relaunched it on the Pacing design system.

How it works

Upload a handful of photos, train a model, pick a style, download the lot. One credit trains one model and makes one pack of headshots. Training usually takes 10 to 30 minutes, and you get one email when the whole pack is ready.

Photo checks before you pay for a bad run

Every upload is checked for selfies, shots that are not close-ups, blurry photos, sunglasses, hats and other people in the frame. If five or more of your photos are flagged, you have to confirm before training starts. The warnings are saved on the model, so we can see why a run came out the way it did.

Credits

• 1 credit, £14.99: one pack, up to 56 headshots depending on the pack.
• 3 credits, £39.99: three packs, mix the styles or cover three people.
• 5 credits, £59.99: five packs, £12 each.

Once a model is trained you can run another pack on it for 30 days without uploading new photos. Each extra pack costs another credit.

Upload rules

• Count: 4 to 10 photos of one person.
• Size and format: under 3MB each, JPG or PNG.
• Resolution: at least 512x512, ideally 1024x1024 or more.
• Face: clear and centred, no sunglasses or hats.

How it's built

A Next.js app on a Hetzner server behind nginx. Supabase handles sign-in (magic-link emails) and the database, Stripe takes payments for credits, Resend sends the emails, and Cloudflare R2 holds the training photos and our copy of every headshot. Astria does the model training and image generation. A deploy action runs on every push to main.

Before the relaunch we ran a full security and performance audit and shipped its fixes: Next.js 15.5, Cloudflare Turnstile on sign-in, tighter handling of credits and a separate staging environment.

• Models expire after 30 days: Astria deletes a trained model 30 days after training. The app shows a countdown and emails a warning at 14, 7 and 1 day.
• Your headshots stay yours: we copy every finished headshot to our own storage, so they stay in your account until you delete them. Download All gets you a ZIP, and you can delete a model whenever you like.
• One production site: there is one live instance, the one linked above.

What we saw

• On the production release test, a Speaker pack made 19 headshots in about 70 seconds once the model was trained, and exactly one ready email went out.
• The relaunch is live and indexable, with its own page titles, canonical links and product schema.
• Credit prices are fixed and public.

If you need a brand photoshoot, hire a photographer. This is the quick, cheap alternative for staff pages, speaker bios and LinkedIn.

Why we built it ourselves

Public AI headshot sites are easy to find and hard to trust with your face. Running our own gave us control over the pricing, the emails and what gets stored.

• One credit, one pack: simple enough to explain in a sentence.
• A visible countdown: better than a delete policy buried in a footer.
• Real runs on the site: the examples are real runs from the app, unretouched, with some names changed.