VectorFox goes direct

VectorFox now ships direct from skulkworks.dev. Same native raster-to-SVG vectorizer, but it's a notarized, Developer ID-signed download with automatic updates, so fixes reach you when I ship them instead of when review gets to them.

If you don't know it: drop a PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, BMP, or TIFF onto VectorFox and it traces it into clean SVG with vtracer, then shrinks the result with a Rust optimizer that routinely takes 50 to 70% off the file size. There are five presets tuned for different kinds of source art, a side-by-side viewer so you can check the trace before you commit, and batch conversion for a whole folder at once. Everything runs on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded.

Pricing works like the rest of the apps now. You get everything for 14 days, no account and no card. After that VectorFox stays free forever and keeps converting unlimited images with the Balanced preset, three at a time, so it never turns into a nag screen. A one-time $9.99 license, good for 3 Macs, adds the other four presets, unlimited batches, up to eight conversions in parallel, the optimizer's own presets and settings, saving alongside the original with filename templates, your own saved presets, and the alternative app icons.

Dropping the sandbox fixed something that always annoyed me: the direct build can write the converted SVG next to the original without asking you to grant folder access first.

Already bought VectorFox Pro on the Mac App Store? You don't pay again. Download the direct build and it spots your existing purchase on launch and unlocks itself, offline, with no key to type. Do it in the right order though: dragging the new version into Applications replaces the App Store copy and deletes the receipt the migration reads, so follow the migration steps before you install. If you want your other Macs covered, it can email you a permanent license key from inside the app. VectorFox stays on the App Store too, so nothing breaks if you'd rather stick with it, though that version won't get further updates.

It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on both Apple silicon and Intel. Get it from the VectorFox page or with Homebrew: brew install --cask skulkworks/tap/vectorfox. Release notes live in the changelog.