Introduction

This is a browser-based design and video studio. You can make business cards, social posts, presentations, infinite-canvas scenes, and videos, all in one place, with nothing to install.

Two places you work

• The editor is where you create and edit. It runs entirely in the browser and holds every kind of design part on one canvas.
• The workspace is your console. It is where you organize projects, media, brand kits, and tags, and manage your account and billing.

You move between them constantly: create a part in the editor, find and share it in the workspace. See Interface tour for a map of both.

What makes it different

• A project is a mixed container, not a single file. One project can hold classic pages, infinite scenes, slide decks, videos, and boards together. This is the one idea worth learning first, and it is covered in Projects and parts.
• Everything is part-aware. Thumbnails, tags, search, and export all operate on a specific part of a project, not just the project as a whole. See Part-aware everything.
• Bring your own AI. AI Studio and the in-editor assistant use a provider key you connect yourself, kept server side and never returned to the browser. You are never locked into one model, and you are billed by your own provider, not by a subscription tier. See Bring your own AI key.
• Own your work. Individuals can use the studio for free, your designs are yours, and you can always export both rendered files and a whole project as a portable archive. See Where your work lives.
• Open source. The project can be self-hosted and run on your own infrastructure. See Self-Hosting.

At a glance

	Today
Cost	Free for individuals, no card required. Paid plans add cloud storage and managed services
AI	Bring your own provider key, billed by that provider
Source	Open, and self-hostable
Account	Needed for cloud save and AI, sign in with email, Google, or GitHub

Who this is for

The editor covers a wide range of work from one canvas: a single business card, a full social media calendar's worth of posts, a slide deck for a pitch, an infinite scene for planning a campaign, or a short marketing video. Because a project can mix all of these together, you are not forced into a separate tool per format.

Which surface am I supposed to be in right now?

A quick gut check for when you're not sure: if you're changing what a design looks like, you're in the wrong place unless you're in the editor. If you're looking for something you already made, checking storage, changing a plan, or managing an account, you're in the wrong place unless you're in the workspace. Almost every "I can't find X" question resolves to being in one surface when the thing you want lives in the other.

Hosted or self-hosted

Most people use a hosted instance, sign in and everything above just works, storage and infrastructure are handled for you. Because the project is open source, you can also run the whole thing yourself, on your own servers, with your own storage and database. Self-hosting has no plan tiers or billing in the way, it's the same app either way. See Self-Hosting and Managed vs. self-hosted.

How these docs are organized

• Guide gets you started and explains the core ideas.
• Editor documents every tool and part type.
• Workspace covers projects, media, brands, tags, and settings.
• AI Studio covers chat, image, and video generation.
• Self-Hosting is for running the open-source project yourself.
• Reference holds shortcuts, formats, a glossary, and the roadmap.

Read Projects and parts next

Nearly every other page assumes you already understand the mixed-container model. It is short, and it will save you from re-reading things once they click.

New here? Start with the Quick start.

Getting started, step by step

1. Open the app and sign in, or create an account with email and password, Google, or GitHub. A personal workspace is set up for you automatically, there is nothing else to configure first. See Sign up and sign in.
2. Pick a starting point from your dashboard: a format tile (business card, social post, presentation, video, or a custom size), a quick tool, or a template. Whichever you choose, the editor opens with a canvas already sized correctly.
3. Build using the two side panels. The left panel adds content (text, shapes, images, icons, backgrounds, your media), the right panel edits whatever is currently selected (properties, layout, layers). Nothing you do here needs a manual save.
4. Let autosave carry the risk. The editor saves continuously as you work, so closing a tab, losing power, or making a bad edit rarely costs you more than a few seconds of progress. Roll back from version history if you need to.
5. Export or share the part you're on. Export always targets the page, frame, slide, or video you're currently looking at, choose a format like PNG or PDF, or skip exporting entirely and share a view-only link instead.
6. Keep going in the same project. Add another page, a scene, a slide deck, or a video to the project you already have open rather than starting a new one for every piece of related work, then organize everything from the workspace once you have more than a couple of things.

Three scenarios this covers

• A single business card. Pick the Business Card tile, add text and a logo, export as PDF for print. One page, one project, done in minutes.
• A social campaign in five sizes. Start one Social Post page, design it, then duplicate the page and resize each copy for Story, Facebook Cover, and LinkedIn Banner, all inside the same project. Tag the ones a client has approved so you can find them again without reopening every page. See Part-aware everything.
• A pitch made of mixed material. Open a slide deck for the narrative, add a scene with a few frames for the product screens you're walking through live, and drop a short video in as its own part, all three live in one project, switchable from the page tabs at the bottom of the editor. See Projects and parts.

Troubleshooting

• "I can't find a button to export the whole project." There isn't one, and this is intentional, not a missing feature. A project mixes different kinds of content with no single format that could represent all of it at once. Export a chosen part instead, or save a .cardcraft project archive as a backup. See A project is a mixed container, not a file.
• "AI Studio or the assistant won't generate anything." Nothing generates until you connect a provider key of your own, there is no shared or default key. See Bring your own AI key.
• "My work isn't on my other device." Work made before you signed in only lives in that one browser's local storage and never leaves it. Sign in, and everything after that point saves to your account instead. See Where your work lives.

What's not built yet

A handful of things you might expect, team accounts, shared organizations, and project comments among them, are planned but not shipped. The Roadmap is the one place these are tracked, everything else in these docs describes what already works today.

Related

• Quick start
• Projects and parts
• Interface tour