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For most images, the hard part is describing a layout in words: put the product on the left, the headline on the right, keep the horizon low. ChatGPT's Sketch tool flips that. You draw the rough arrangement, and the model fills in the finished picture around your drawing.

OpenAI shipped Sketch on 8 September 2026 as part of ChatGPT Images 2.5. It arrived with three other image features: templates for common formats, comments placed straight onto an image, and shareable prompts. Sketch is available on every ChatGPT tier, on web, desktop and mobile. On the mobile app you open it by typing @ in the message box and choosing Sketch; OpenAI also links the web canvas at chatgpt.com/sketch.

The one idea that makes it work

Sketch is not a painting tool, and it does not grade your drawing. OpenAI describes it as a visual guide, and the model reads your shapes as a layout rather than a style to copy, so boxes, circles and stick figures are enough. The rule that gets good results is a division of labour: the drawing decides position and size, the words decide everything else.

Put in the sketch: where each object sits, how big it is next to the others, the camera angle or horizon, and a box where text should go. Put in the prompt: what each shape actually is, the colours, materials and style, the light and mood, the exact words in quotes, and the picture shape. Skip the labelling and the model has to guess that a circle is a table and not a sun.

A prompt you can reuse

Draw the layout first, then paste this and fill the brackets:

Use my sketch as the layout and keep the position and size of every shape exactly where I drew it. What the shapes are: [the big circle is a round wooden table, the two small boxes are chairs]. Style: [a realistic interior photo]. Light and mood: [soft morning light, calm and warm]. Text: ["Hello" or none]. Shape: [4:5 portrait].

Put the "keep every shape exactly where I drew it" line first, not last; that instruction is the one that holds the layout. If the model copies your messy pencil lines into the render, add that the sketch is for layout only, not a style to copy.

Fixing the small parts

Images 2.5 also added comments. On mobile, open a generated image full-screen, tap Comment, drop a pin on the exact spot and type what to change, such as "make this lamp brass". For one small correction that is usually faster than rewriting the whole prompt.

The limits

Generation can still take a few minutes, and the editor's selection highlights are not always precise: an edit may bleed past the area you marked, so check the edges. The sketch canvas is on the mobile app, templates are still rolling out (they are not in Work mode yet), and every image carries C2PA metadata and an invisible watermark, so a generated picture is traceable rather than anonymous.

What to take from it

Sketch is a small change with a useful habit behind it: say where with a drawing, say what with words. For anything with a fixed composition - a poster, a room layout, a product shot, a book cover - that beats fighting a hundred-word description. It is free on every plan, so trying it on your next image costs a two-minute doodle.

A founder who had spent his career in business software had never shipped a mobile app. In about three weeks he built his first one, mostly by directing coding agents. Six months later, he says it was earning roughly $2,000 a day.

The app itself is almost boring on purpose. It is an encrypted storage app for photos and files, close in use to a cloud drive but locked with a pattern on the phone. Everything is encrypted on the device, there are no servers and no shared keys, and the founder says he cannot see or recover what a user stores.

The numbers, as the founder states them

In the first month, the app made $66. Six months in, it was bringing in about $41,000 in a single month, with daily revenue hovering near $2,000 and roughly 2,000 to 3,000 downloads a day. The founder says it passed 60,000 total downloads.

Pricing is deliberately cheap: a weekly plan at $1.99, an annual plan at $19.99 and a one-off lifetime unlock at $39.99. He says most buyers choose the lifetime option, which accounts for the large majority of revenue even though the monthly recurring number looks small. Only about 5.5% of downloads convert on day one, but conversion keeps rising for weeks, with the best rates around day 35.

How he grew it: AI-written guides, not ads

The growth did not come from paid ads or short-video stunts. It came from a plain website and a stream of search-friendly guides that answer questions like how to keep photos private on an iPhone. The founder says he did not write the site copy himself; coding agents produced the pages, the text and the internal links.

His routine is a keyword loop. Every morning an agent checks a keyword tool for search terms where the site appears but gets few clicks, picks the useful ones, drafts a guide around them, and links it from pages that already get traffic. He publishes about one guide a day. The web now sends most of the app's visitors, and he estimates around 10% of those visitors convert to a download.

The AI tools behind it

The stack is small. The app is native Swift; there is no separate backend to keep alive. For the marketing engine he leans on Codex and Claude; he describes the daily guide almost as an agent waking up and running a task on its own. He also mentions an open-source command-line toolkit he wrote that ties Google search and keyword tools into that workflow, and a free analytics tool for measurement.

What to take from it

The useful lesson is not a prompt or a weekend hack. It is that a simple, proven app category plus a patient, low-volume content system can compound: cheap price, late conversion, steady search traffic. He did not need a brand-new idea; he needed to ship and then keep answering the questions customers already typed into a search box.

There are real caveats. Every figure here is self-reported in a promotional case-study interview and has not been independently audited. Search-driven growth is slow and depends on one platform's ranking; the founder himself notes the older apps he competes with sell far more. Results like these are not typical and are not a promise that anyone repeating the steps will match them.

Main source: Starter Story's 18 October 2026 case-study episode, which reports the founder's own figures and dashboard shots. Auratro has not tested the app or verified its income.