Ask HN: Would you pay for this Image Management API? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you pay for this Image Management API?

5 pointssudhirj7 comments

http://www.runway7.net/signs

I've struggled a bit myself with setting up systems for image management, storage, hosting and thumbnail generation, so I thought I'd create an API that I would have liked to see.

Would you pay for this, especially if there was a gem / egg / module that would integrate seamlessly into your projects?

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Image manipulation + storage + CDN is a very interesting combination, especially if images can be uploaded straight from the browser, without travelling through the application server.

But for a service with large amount of user uploaded images (like we plan to have at http://pllop.it) pricing is the major issue. At $0.50 per GB you would be around 5 x more expensive than CloudFront and even they are expensive compared to other options.

If the price would be on the level of CloudFront with 10-30% premium for taking care of image manipulation, we would consider using such service.

That's really helpful... thanks. I'll try to start with pricing that's closer to $0.30 / GB - that should be workable. I'm trying to look at usage patterns now to see what prices are viable.

Also, would you take the "I'll cut prices as and when I achieve better utilization" promise into consideration? Or is that irrelevant?

From the cost planning perspective the promise doesn't help much. We need to know how much it costs and how much it will cost without relying on how other clients use the service.

Hope that helps. Wish you a lot of success with your venture!

It's kind of ironic that you'd criticize him on not having a pricing model well defined yet... but on pllop.it you guys say "We are still figuring out the exact pricing model. One idea is to charge from $10 per month for unlimited Pllops with soft limit on monthly views. In the meantime Pllop.it is free."

Aren't you both in the same boat here?

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By the way what kind of pricing would you be interested in?

Would 10 to 15 cents per GB suit your needs?

I think this is a growing field...you guys already have a competitor: http://www.imgix.com/

They require you to have an S3 bucket for them to upload into--so they only handle the thumbnail generation.

Transloadit.com does that. It can create multiple resized versions of an image, add watermarks, as well as upload to amazon s3. I use it for imgfave.com which gets around 5,000 uploads a day and it works great.

Yup... I think they do a great job. I'm trying to give people something that they start using with no more effort than `gem install signs` and filling in API keys. I'm looking at making it an order of magnitude cheaper, and far simpler, without that many moving parts.

Since this is MVP type stuff, I think that's all I can do now anyway :D

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