DeepNude alternatives that still work

DeepNude itself has been dead since 2019, pulled by its own author days after it went viral. What carries the name now is either a modern service or a file you should not run.

A short history, because it explains the present

DeepNude was released in June 2019, cost $50, ran locally, and worked on a narrow set of photos. It was taken down within a week by its creator, who said the probability of misuse was too high. The code leaked anyway, and for a couple of years the name belonged to whoever had reuploaded it most recently.

The technology underneath has been replaced twice since. Diffusion models do this far better than the original GAN, which is why a current service and a 2019 executable are not two versions of the same thing.

The two scams to recognise

The download. An .exe or .apk with the old name, usually bundled. There is no way to verify it, and the people distributing it are not doing it out of nostalgia.

The card form. A site that looks current, takes a card, and either charges a subscription you cannot cancel or simply sells the number on. The tell is a payment page on a different domain than the site, registered recently.

What a working alternative looks like in 2026

• Nothing to install. It runs on somebody's GPU, not your laptop.
• The price is on the page, in a currency you can check, before any signup.
• A payment rail that is not a raw card form — Telegram Stars, crypto, or a gift code.
• A written retention period and a delete command that exists.
• A stated position on consent, because the ones with no position are the ones that end up in the news.

Quality, compared with the original

Not close. The old model produced a single deterministic answer that fell apart on anything but a plain frontal photo in good light. Current pipelines handle pose, fabric and lighting, and produce a different sample each run, so a bad result is one retry away instead of a dead end.

The legal shift nobody mentions in the ads

Between 2023 and 2026 a number of jurisdictions moved this from a civil matter to a criminal one when the subject is a real, identifiable person who did not consent. The UK, several US states and parts of the EU now have explicit provisions. Of yourself, or of somebody who agreed: your business. Of a classmate or a colleague: a criminal record is a real outcome now, and no service that cares about staying up will help you do it.

Questions