PaintRush Shutdown Notice
EDIT: the site has been shut down. Source code can be found here. Thank you all for tuning in!
TL;DR: PaintRush is shutting down on March 31st at 12:00 AM EST. The code will be open sourced. All unused credits will be refunded.
What's PaintRush, Again?
An art commissions website with a focus on livestreamed work. You'd go to an artist's schedule (or just send an immediate request to one that's online) and basically pay to "book" their time - if they accepted, you could come back at the agreed-upon time and watch your creation get made live. There was gonna be more to it, but that's where it stands.
PaintRush was something I made because I wanted it to exist. I had a few of my artist friends' priorities in mind - the kind who specialize in quick, cheap commissions - but ultimately, my main goal was to rethink art requests entirely. I built some features rivaling the offerings of other companies like VGen and Fiverr, even if it wasn't enough to become competitive with them. It even got the attention of a couple artists I looked up to! So...
Why the Shutdown?
Long story short, the site hasn't been doing well. Sales lagged as I stopped talking about it publicly, yet the cost to run the server has remained the same, which means we've been running at a loss - and real-life circumstances have cut my finances, meaning I can no longer sufficiently shoulder the risk.
Let me clarify that this outcome was sorta obvious in hindsight - when I posted the trailer in November, I had sufficient extra funds to be predicting that I could just spend money to acquire clients if that became the bottleneck... by the time I realized that was the case, I had spent myself dry on Christmas presents for my family, a point I still haven't fully recovered from yet.
Loss of Attention
A few more changes in my life that took me away from PaintRush:
- After the first 3 weeks of grinding away at the site, it was the Christmas season and I promised my partner I'd take 2 weeks off for it.
- When I came back, I was being a lot more careful about code quality. I started implementing fun additions like the quick drawing tool to keep myself entertained, but I kept putting off the Not-Fun things like better admin controls, dispute resolution handling, setting up analytics providers... instead, I mostly just did cleanup work and called it a day. In retrospect, I think I'd call it burnout.
- By February, Comic Studio work started back up internally. I jumped between projects, struggling to context-switch as I worked on whatever was needed of me. This is the point where the revenue stopped coming in, which didn't help with motivation either. Also, I ran out of ADHD meds.
- This month: a major shift to CS I can't announce yet which is even more damning to my other projects. I no longer have time to work on several codebases at once, and I need to run Comic Studio as it's the only thing making me money. I'm about to figure out my taxes, and the most convenient date to end the site as a financial liability is at the end of March. I cancel my plans for a hail mary update.
Between my financial woes and recent lack of time, it strikes me that I shouldn't have made something that runs on other people's money if I can't be there to give my all to it - my all as in money to spend on the site, and also as in time to be able to fix all of the issues in time for people to use the site.
As mentioned, I will be refunding all unused credits at the end of the month after the site shuts down. You can still add some now if you want to enjoy the site one more time; I'm sure the artists that are still there would appreciate it. If you need help with anything else, message me on Discord or Twitter, or send me an email.
But! Some Cool Stats
In the 3½ months the site has been up, we've had:
- 289 accepted artists with public profiles
- 755 requests made
- $1,497.95 in commission volume
- 12,944 chat messages sent
- 30,016 views on YouTube (trailer, now unlisted)
Not bad at all! A better businessperson could've turned this into something big. That doesn't feel like me, though - I'd rather make cool things for the sake of making and sharing them. Speaking of which...
Open Source Version Info
After I clean this up and outline what needs to be done for this codebase to really be usable by anyone else, I'll be publishing the site's entire React + Next.js + Convex source code on GitHub under a permissible license. I figure that if I can't make it work, someone else could at least get some use out of it. I'd love for other commission sites to adopt our tools!
In Conclusion
Thank you to those who put their faith in my weird idea!! I had a lot more planned for it (you'll see in the repo), but I have to call it here. This is the first and only time I've run a SaaS-type application like this, and I've learned my lesson - no more taking other people's money until I can give 100% of myself in the process. Free stuff is less stressful anyways!
Big updates to Comic Studio soon, look forward to it if you care. You can follow my main blog @syrupyy for updates on that + the game I'm making in my free time. My other socials can be found on my website.
Rest in peace PaintRush 11/29/2025 - 3/31/2026
