So the resizing alone makes Imgix very valuable to us. We're in an interesting situation though, where we have relatively few `master` images, but hundreds of renders per image, which are then seen millions of times each month. That's a perfect fit with Imgix's pricing model.
We tried Imgix on a few other products where we had tens of thousands of images being uploaded each month and only seen a couple hundred times per image. That became prohibitively expensive — which is probably a similar situation that you ended up in (high number of `master` images to render ratio).
In addition to realtime resizing, we use:
- face detection - typesetting - overlays - cropping/point of interest cropping - color palette - exif/image metadata - client hints - automatic content negotiation
Pretty much everything except their watermarking endpoint haha ;)