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Comment by minot | Hacker News Reader

I still don’t understand how this business model works at all. Take cloudinary, for example. You can have your images transformed and hosted by cloudinary. So like you have a photo and let cloudinary examine the photo and serve different sizes, cropping to a human face as a circle for profile pictures for example. It is expensive. All you need is some idiot hitting refresh in a few tabs on the browser for a few hours on your website for you to run over your free tier.

I’d imagine that anyone spending real money is always thinking of ways to get off of something like this?

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People don't pay you to run xyz, they pay you to solve their problems. If you can solve a problem that real businesses have, then as long as you're not charging enough to be a bigger problem than the original problem, they'll be happy to pay it.

I did some contracting work a few years ago, and one of our clients was a small entertainment news site. They used cloudinary for image hosting and were paying some insane amount for image hosting. I think their cloudinary bill was $8000/month or something. The client didn't even know that was expensive. They just saw it as a cost of doing business, alongside their cloudflare bill and so on. (And what they were paying us.)

It took work over several weeks to convince them that that was a ripoff. I think their business people eventually called up cloudinary and negotiated a better rate, but by that point I was annoyed by the whole situation. The site used cloudinary's HTTP based API from the browser. I configured cloudflare to redirect any request hitting example.com/images/... to act as a caching proxy to cloudinary's actual servers. Unsurprisingly, that one configuration change made their cloudinary bill drop to about 1/20th what it was. When the client was billed we got a panicked phone call asking why it was so low, and if something was broken on their site.

Anyway, tldr; lots of folks out there have no idea what a service like cloudinary should cost. Apparently more than enough to make cloudinary a profitable business.

Awesome story.

I think it's also a problem that engineers are rarely incentivized to make the right decision initially. If the initial price is low they will be prized if they able to cut down the development time. After that if the solution auto scales then it will be the beancounter's problem.

I deliberately make things expensive during development so there’s room to ‘optimize’ later.

I actually looked at Cloudinary for my job. I thought the pricing didn’t make sense so I ended up just running imgproxy on Heroku (it was free tier for a long time but I upped to hobbyist to get better latency).

We pay like $200/mo for Cloudinary and we barely use any of the features. Primarily it's to serve up an image scaled to the right (single) size and occasionally I'll tweak the URL to add an effect, a tint, or something. This convenience is worth the money so far considering $200/mo is a rounding error in our monthly expenses but I could probably write a script to achieve similar ends in a few hours and upload to S3 instead..

Even if it's a rounding error, it sounds like you'd break even from having one of your developers do it within a month or two. Unless everyone truly has a months-long backlog of high-impact stuff to do it sounds like a good argument to do it some Friday afternoon.

It doesn't work like that. Cloudinary caches the transform so you only pay for the first time for the transform. Of course, you do have to pay for the bandwidth but by then the image would be cached somewhere on the network or on the browser anyways.

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