About Gulkz

Instant format and resolution optimiser. Gulkz is a Vienna software studio born out of a frustration with bloated converters that ask three questions before doing the obvious thing. The home page has one upload zone, one slider, and one button. That is on purpose.

Below 500 ms or it does not ship

The internal target is 500 millisecond median time-to-first-download on commodity Vienna hosting, including server-side decode, encode and HTTP response. Below that, users perceive the conversion as instant; above it, they start opening another tab. Anything that pushes us above the threshold gets refactored or rolled back.

Layers we removed

We stripped four layers from the conversion path that other tools usually keep: cold-start cost, pointless database connections, response buffers held until the slowest item finishes, ZIP archives built when the user only wanted one file. Each layer was costing about a hundred milliseconds. Removing all four took the median below 500 ms.

Power-user requests we declined

Power users sometimes ask for queue management, presets, account-bound history, scheduled runs. We have looked at each and rejected each on the same grounds: ninety per cent of our users come, convert one file and leave. Building features for the loud minority would slow the experience for the quiet majority. The home page has one button on purpose.

Privacy and retention

Working files are deleted within twenty-four hours by an automatic sweeper. We do not keep hashes, thumbnails or analytics copies. The cropper runs inside the browser tab so cropped images never reach Gulkz servers. There is no signup wall and there is no “upgrade” nag; the public tier is the public tier.

How Gulkz funds itself

Display advertising via reputable networks pays for the public tier. We do not accept payment to feature specific brands, formats or platforms inside the tools or the blog. The team is small enough that real names answer support e-mails; the discipline is small enough that no feature ships without measurable improvement to the median time to first download.

Getting in touch

For partnership requests, advertising enquiries or press, please use the same e-mail address with a subject line that starts with “Press” or “Partnership”. We aim to reply within two business days.

Meet the editor