AdHalo is on Product Hunt
AdHalo is live on Product Hunt today. If you sell physical products and you have ever stared at a decent photo of one wondering how to turn it into six ads by Thursday, this is for you.
What it actually does
You upload one product photo. AdHalo gives you back six finished ads from six different angles — different scenes, different framings, different pitches — with the headline, support line, price and call-to-action written for you and designed into the image.
That last part is the whole thing, and it is the part that took longest to get right.
Most tools that "add text to your image" do exactly that: they generate a picture, then stamp type over the top of it. You can always tell. The type sits on a layer that does not know what is underneath it — it lands on a busy patch, it fights the product, it looks like a caption rather than an ad. The first version of AdHalo did this too, and every ad it made had the same faint wrongness.
Now the copy is part of the composition. The scene is designed around the words. Your logo can be dropped exactly where you want it — dragged into position with a live preview, not picked from four corners and hoped for — and there is a blended mode that sits it into the scene rather than pasting it on.
Ads come out sized for the feeds they are going to. There is a search-and-filter view once you have made more than a handful, you can select several and download them as one zip, and you can rewrite any headline yourself if the machine's attempt is not what you meant.
And since last week, video: the same designed-first approach, moving. Your logo and your copy live inside the footage rather than being drawn over a clip afterwards.
What it costs
- Free — 6 ads, yours to keep. No credit card.
- $29/mo — 100 image ads a month. That is 29¢ an ad.
- $79/mo — 200 image ads a month, plus the premium image engine and real-person scenes: your product held by a customer, in use, in a room.
For comparison, the going rate for a single decent product ad from a freelancer starts around $30 and takes a few days. The free tier exists because I would rather you find out in ten minutes whether the output is good enough for your store than read me claiming it is.
The bugs worth admitting
Building in public means the log is public, so here are the ones that stung.
Brand colours were being set and never arriving. You picked your palette, the setting saved, the ads came back in someone else's colours. The values were being collected correctly and then quietly dropped before they reached the artwork. Everything looked wired up; nothing was.
Video ads did not play on iPhone at all. Multi-scene videos rendered fine, played fine on my machine, played fine in Chrome — and were simply broken in Safari and on every iPhone. For an ad tool, where the entire audience is on phones, that is close to the worst possible place to have a blind spot.
"All ads" was quietly leaving out the video ones. The page called itself All ads. It showed image ads. Nobody had told it about videos, and it did not think to mention the omission.
Making a video ad was effectively hidden. The button to create one appeared before you had made your first video, and then disappeared. So the flow worked perfectly for people who had never used it and vanished for everyone who had.
None of these were exotic. They were all the same shape: the thing looked correct from the outside, and the only way to find out otherwise was to actually use it on a real phone with real inputs. That is most of what shipping alone is.
Where it is going
The next real question is not a feature, it is whether the ads convert — which is a question only sellers with real stores and real spend can answer. If you run one, that is exactly the feedback I want: not "the UI is nice", but "the third angle beat my current creative" or "none of these are usable and here is why".
Try it free — six ads, no card. Or come say something on Product Hunt, where I will be all day.