About
A bead pattern generator built right
Bitbead is an indie tool — no VC, no signup, no upload. Just a free chart-maker that does the bead-counting maths so you can spend your time actually making things.
Why Bitbead exists
Every other perler bead pattern site I tried did one of three things: locked the good features behind a login, ran the algorithm on a server (uploading my photos to who-knows-where), or generated a beautiful preview without telling me how many beads I'd actually need to buy. Bitbead flips that. The whole tool runs in your browser using image-q's CIEDE2000 colour matching — the same algorithm professional colour-management software uses. Your photos never touch a server. Total bead count, real-world dimensions, and a per-colour shopping list show up the moment quantization finishes. And it's free, in four languages, with all four major bead brands.
What we believe
Four principles
Free, forever
No paid tier, no daily limit, no watermark.
Photos stay on your device
Quantization, dithering, PDF export — all client-side. The image you upload never leaves your browser.
Real beads, real codes
Every output references actual brand colours you can buy: Perler, Hama, Artkal, MARD with their official codes.
Built for craft, not content
Bitbead outputs print-ready PDFs and exact materials lists. It's a tool for finished projects, not Instagram screenshots.
Built on
Bitbead stands on the shoulders of these excellent open-source projects.
image-q
TypeScript image quantization (CIEDE2000 / RGBQuant / NeuQuant). The colour-matching engine.
Fusion Pixel 12px
Self-hosted CJK pixel font by TakWolf — covers Latin, simplified + traditional Chinese, and Japanese.
Press Start 2P
The classic 8-bit display font for Latin headlines and UI accents.
Next.js
App Router + static export = the entire site is pre-rendered, then served from CDN.
Lucide icons
Open-source icon library — every icon in the UI ships from here.
Say hi
Bug reports, feature requests, photos of finished creations — anything goes.