Zaga: personalized picture books made with generative AI
A product we co-own and build. Upload a photo, pick a theme, and Zaga writes and illustrates a story starring your child, then prints it as a hardcover book. Launching soon.
The challenge
Many personalized children's books just swap a name into a fixed template. We wanted every book to be a new story, with illustrations that look like the child in the photo, printed well enough to keep on the shelf.
What we built
We designed Zaga as a generation pipeline, not a template engine. The web app and API hand each order to background jobs that write the story, illustrate it from the child's photo and render a print-ready book and cover. Generation runs across several AI model providers with automatic fallbacks, so one provider's outage doesn't stop a book. Checkout and print-on-demand fulfillment are connected end to end, and DJTL is the main engineering contributor.
The result
The full pipeline is built: photo to story, illustrations, layout, print-ready cover, checkout and printing. We placed the first test orders in 2026, and the public launch is next.
Have something worth building?
Tell us about it. We usually reply within a working day.