Topaz Gigapixel Alternatives After the Subscription Switch

Four situations where paying Topaz is the right call and this page should not talk you out of it.

The output is the deliverable. A gallery print from a 12-megapixel file, a restored family photograph, a product shot that has to hold up at billboard size. When the upscale is the work rather than a step on the way to something else, buy the tool built for it. A bundled upscaler in a $29 utility is not competing for that job and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.

You need a specific model. Gigapixel ships Wonder 2 and 3, Standard, Standard Max, High Fidelity, Low Res, Text & Shapes, Art & CG, Recover, Redefine and Face Recovery. Those exist because a scanned document, an anime cel, a compressed JPEG off a phone and a portrait all fail in different ways. Smol has one pipeline. Upscayl has several, but not a face recovery model of Topaz’s caliber.

You work inside Photoshop or Lightroom. Gigapixel installs as a plugin. Neither Smol nor Upscayl does, and round-tripping through the Finder is a genuinely worse workflow when you are ten layers into a composite.

You are on Windows. Smol is macOS only. Gigapixel and Upscayl both run on Windows.

The case against Gigapixel is not quality. It is that a great many people who search for a Gigapixel alternative are not doing gallery work at all. They have one image that needs to be bigger, once, and a $149 annual plan is a strange way to solve that.

Two things, and the second one landed this week.

Perpetual licenses ended. On 17 September 2025, in a community post titled “Topaz Studio | Message from the CEO”, Eric Yang wrote that “perpetual licenses will no longer be available for our products”, alongside the reassurance that “your existing perpetual licenses remain yours forever.” Trade coverage at the time, including CG Channel on 30 September 2025, reported the last day to buy one as 3 October 2025. Anyone who bought before that date still owns what they bought. Everyone else now rents.

Adobe bought the company. Adobe announced a definitive agreement on 25 June 2026 and closed it on 23 September 2026. Adobe’s own post is explicit that the Topaz Labs brand stays and that its apps and models continue as standalone products, with CEO Eric Yang joining Adobe’s Digital Video and Audio team. No purchase price was disclosed in either announcement.

Treat Adobe’s standalone commitment as what it is: a sincere statement of current intent, made three days ago, about a product that now reports into a subscription business. It might hold for years. It is not a license you own. That distinction is the entire reason this page exists.

These figures come off topazlabs.com/pricing on 26 September 2026. Search that page for “perpetual”, “lifetime” or “one-time” and you get nothing.

Three-year column is simple arithmetic on the annual price, not a quoted figure. Topaz offers a free trial; Gigapixel Pro adds full commercial use and higher export limits.

The $149 is not outrageous for what it does. Gigapixel earns its price for a retoucher billing by the hour. It is a strange price for someone who upscales eleven images a year, and that describes most of the people typing this query into Google.

For most non-professional use, yes, and saying otherwise on a page selling a paid app would be dishonest.

Upscayl is AGPL-3.0 licensed with 49,907 GitHub stars as of 26 September 2026. Its README states it runs on “MacOS 12 and later” and that “It uses Real-ESRGAN and Vulkan architecture”, with the upscayl-ncnn backend also under AGPLv3. It batches, it offers several models, and it advertises up to 16×, achieved partly by running the upscaler twice through a “Double Upscayl” option.

One thing to know before you rely on it: the most recent tagged release is v2.15.0, published 25 December 2024, and the most recent commit on the main branch is dated 27 March 2026. The project is not abandoned, but the release cadence has slowed considerably. There is also a separate paid Upscayl Cloud service, at $24.99 for 300 credits a month with a 10-credit free trial. The desktop app is free and stays free.

Here is the part we would rather not write, so here it is up front. Smol’s upscaler also runs Real-ESRGAN, bundled and local. On the core model, Upscayl and Smol are doing the same thing, and Upscayl costs nothing. If upscaling is all you need, install Upscayl. We are not going to invent a reason for you to pay us for that specific capability.

In the folder, not in the model. Smol’s upscaler exists because the images that need enlarging usually sit next to images that need compressing, a PDF that is too big to email, and a screen recording nobody can upload.

The specifics, so nobody is surprised after paying: Smol upscales at 2×, 3× or 4×, writing PNG, JPG or WebP, defaulting to 2× and PNG. There is no model picker and no face recovery model. That is the whole feature.

What surrounds it is the argument. The same $29 covers image compression to JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC and GIF; PDF compression at five presets plus PDF to PNG or JPG; video to MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV; audio; document, spreadsheet, table and font conversion; and a Neural mode with a target size control from 4 KB to 4096 KB, which is a genuine “make this exactly 500 KB” dial that almost no desktop competitor exposes. Gigapixel does one thing extremely well. Smol does fifteen things well enough that you stop opening other apps.

For anything repeatable, the interface should not be a window at all. Smol ships an MCP server, so Claude Code, Codex or Google Antigravity can upscale a directory of thumbnails and then compress the results as ordinary steps inside a task. That is a different product category from a subscription upscaler, and it is the honest reason someone would choose us over a free tool that only upscales.

Preview belongs on that list. If a logo needs to be 2,000 pixels wide for a slide and nobody will inspect it at 100%, Tools, Adjust Size, done. No model will improve that outcome enough to matter and it costs nothing.

The rest of this site works the same way. Squoosh alternatives covers the image compression side and why Google stopped maintaining the best encoder UI ever built. HandBrake alternatives for Mac explains why its slower presets produce bigger files, which is the most confusing thing in video encoding. Optimage alternatives is the one where a competitor really did stop shipping, with the dates to prove it.

If the bundle is what you want, Smol is a one-time $29 purchase for one Mac, with no subscription and no per-file limits. If you only want the best upscale, that is still Gigapixel, and if you only want a free upscale, that is still Upscayl.