What EngraveBot is
EngraveBot is a small set of free tools that handle the tedious part of laser engraving: getting from an ordinary photo to a file your machine can actually burn well. Dithering with live preview, background removal, depth maps for 3D relief, material-aware export - the whole prep pipeline, in the browser, in about 30 seconds.
Everything runs on your own device. Your photos are processed locally in your browser and never leave it - there is no upload step, no server-side gallery of your family pictures, no account required to use the core tools. You can check this yourself: open the network tab of your browser while you work. The free tools stay free, at full quality, with no watermark.
Start with the tools, read the guides, or see pricing if you're curious how the project plans to sustain itself.
Who builds it
EngraveBot is built by Zbigniew, a maker who got tired of the boring parts of laser prep - the endless round-trips through photo editors, the guesswork of dithering modes, the forum threads that answer "what settings for slate?" with twelve contradictory numbers. So he started automating those parts, one tool at a time. He writes the guides, builds the tools, and burns the test grids.
It's a small, independent project. There is no growth team, no content farm, and no incentive to tell you anything other than what actually works.
The honest-settings rule
Here is the part that matters most, so we'll say it plainly:
Every power and speed number on this site is a starting point, not a guarantee. Two machines with the same wattage on the sticker can behave very differently, and "walnut" from two suppliers is two different materials. Any site that hands you one magic number is skipping the truth.
That's why every setting published here is clearly labeled as a starting point, and every guide tells you to burn a small test grid on scrap before touching the real workpiece. It costs ten minutes and it's the only method that has ever worked reliably.
The project has one hard rule that follows from this: a setting only becomes "verified" after a real burn on real material. Untested numbers are never presented as tested ones. The long-term roadmap is a community database of verified settings - each entry tied to a specific machine and material, with photo proof of the actual burn. Until an entry has that proof, it stays a starting point and says so.
The same rule applies to the site itself: no fake testimonials, no invented results, no stock-photo "happy customers." If you don't see reviews here, it's because we won't write fictional ones - the results will speak when there are results to show.
There's also a category of tool we deliberately won't build: anything that generates unverified settings and presents them as answers, like a "power converter between machines." Extrapolated numbers on a laser aren't just wrong, they can be unsafe. If a feature can't be honest, it doesn't ship.
Why in-browser, why privacy-first
Running the heavy processing in your browser isn't just a technical flourish - it's the architecture that makes the honesty possible.
- Your photos stay yours. Portraits of your kids, client work, memorial photos - none of it should sit on someone else's server just to get dithered. Local processing means it never does.
- It works offline and keeps working. A tool that runs on your device can't be taken away by a server shutdown or paywalled retroactively.
- It keeps the project cheap to run - which is exactly why the core tools can stay free without ads, dark patterns, or selling data. The optional Pro plan covers the one thing browsers can't do well (heavy GPU depth-map processing), and that's the only thing it charges for.
Analytics on this site are consent-based and off by default; the site honors Do Not Track. Affiliate links, where they exist, are disclosed on the page.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or a settings result you want to share? Write to hello@engravebot.com. Corrections are especially welcome - if a guide says something your burns contradict, that's exactly the feedback that makes the verified database possible.
Next steps: try the free tools · read the engraving guides · meet the author.