
Everpix is Shutting Down - uptown
https://www.everpix.com/landing.html#adieu
======
armandososa
I'm a little ashamed to say that this is the first time the shutting down of a
service almost brings me to tears. A couple months ago, burglars entered my
house and stoled --among other valuable stuff-- our laptops (wife's and mine)
our cameras and with them a lot of pictures from our first year married. While
I was able to recover some from iCloud and Dropbox and instagram, my wife was
crying hopelessly for the lost of her photos.

The truth is, handling photos and backups is hard and time consuming. I was so
happy when I started using Everpix just last month. I was so sure that I will
never have to worry about backups and storage and that my photos would be
always safe. Naive, I know, but I wanted to believe.

Have they charged me $20 a month, I would have been more than happy to pay.

~~~
esusatyo
Truth is, there aren't as many people like you and me who would pay $20 a
month to Everpix. So many people are just not worried about their data until
something bad happens to them.

I kept telling every single friend every time I see them post data loss grief
status update on Facebook - use Dropbox, use CrashPlan, use iCloud, etc etc.
And yet it seems like they either think that their data is not worth $5 a
month, or that once accident happens to them it can't happen for the second
time.

What the world really needs is an education of how important it is to backup
our data.

~~~
jonny_eh
Right, people only value their data once it's gone. Here's an idea: free and
seamless backing up of your data, but if you want to access it in the case of
loss, you pay through the nose.

~~~
alandarev
Ha, that is an excellent idea :)

------
uptown
Additional reporting about why they're shutting down:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-
and-d...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-death-
inside-the-worlds-best-photo-startup)

------
Fuzzwah
Eventually "growth hacking" is going to be replaced by "sustainable business
plan hacking".

~~~
ssharp
Tt doesn't sound like that was the issue here. They had a functional business
model, as they have specifically said that their user revenues outpaced their
customer acquisition and service costs. They had positive customer lifetime
value. The issue was that they couldn't acquire enough customers to pay their
overhead.

It's actually a case where "growth hacking" would have been good for them
because they needed more users to justify their fixed costs.

~~~
mbesto
> _It 's actually a case where "growth hacking" would have been good for them
> because they needed more users to justify their fixed costs._

Here's the current crux of the startup world cost structure - it's not
variable based on business solution, but rather technical solution - and this
is problematic. Here's the general group-thought - the more money we put into
a company the quicker it can sustain growth.

Let's say (none of this following data is accurate, just giving an example) it
costs $20k to run the servers for Pinterest (which can make $5 per user on
advertising) and it costs the same $20k to run Everpix (which is a freemium
service, that makes on average $1.50 per user). As long as profit margins are
sustainable both companies can survive. The problem is, no tech startup today
I know of really assesses their cost structure today because "its cheap". We
get the "scale as we grow" cost structures of providers and just assume that
economies of scale mean that the more users we get the cheaper it gets.
However, it's often is the case that the things that don't scale (humans and
human costs) are not entirely sustainable and nearly as predictable.

Very generally speaking, I believe this means a few things:

1) One business model will tend to outweigh others (today this is advertising)

2) Shovel sellers are the more sustainable winners here.[1]

3) I think we'll slowly start to see a re-shift to offshore development as the
ecosystem of "get code out the door technologies" (Rails, Node, PaaS-plays,
etc) become much more mature in other markets (as it happened during the first
.com burst).

One of my favorite Drucker quotes resonates well:

 _" For the problem of any business is not the maximization of profit but the
achievement of sufficient profit to cover the risks of economic activity and
thus to avoid loss."_

[1]-[http://startupsunplugged.com/startup-data/selling-shovels-
in...](http://startupsunplugged.com/startup-data/selling-shovels-in-the-new-
gold-rush/)

------
uptown
I've never used Everpix ... though I considered signing up a while back due to
the critical acclaim they seemed to have achieved. But I've given up hosting
my photos with paid services. The best alternative I've found is Koken. It is
free software you host yourself, and provides great interface to manage,
publish, and share your photos. Additionally, they have plugins from Lightroom
to publish directly from your desktop to your host. I'm certain it lacks many
of the algorithmic and aggregating features Everpix offered ... but for
organizing my collection, and sharing it in a place I know won't decide to go
out of business, it's worked well for me.

[http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

~~~
alok-g
I cannot believe this is free! The website puts this right too: "Free
download. Seriously."

Only thing I cannot figure from their website is how to upload pictures and
albums in bulk. Does someone know if this is possible?

~~~
uptown
The interface provides a drag-and-drop way to upload images, or if you're a
Lightroom user - you can publish with the plugin directly from Lightroom.

------
hospadam
Everpix was one of the best $5/month I spent. I would have been willing to
spend far more for their services. I wish they would have tried to bump the
price up to save the service. Having one place for all my photos made me
exceptionally happy. Even my wife absolutely loved Everpix.

I guess I need to find an alternative... what are they?

~~~
toomuchtodo
[https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos](https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos)

[https://trovebox.com/](https://trovebox.com/)

[https://loom.com/](https://loom.com/)

[http://www.smugmug.com/](http://www.smugmug.com/)

and of course, [http://www.flickr.com/](http://www.flickr.com/)

~~~
hospadam
One of the key features of Everpix was the "set and forget" capability. Also
their dupe-detection was really good.

Do any of those do that? I guess Dropbox is the most established... I'd hate
to be in this same situation in a year from now with Loom...

~~~
dirtyaura
The problem with Dropbox is that photos are eating space on my local hard
drive, unless I manually manage them. Everpix was perfect from the syncing
perspective. Sharing could have been improved and I think they should have put
more effort to private sharing experience and that would have helped with
growth too.

~~~
suchire
You can selectively unsync particular folders in your Dropbox Advanced
Preferences; that's what I do with my Camera Uploads folder.

~~~
rsl7
That still presents the problem of frequent uploads: you have to sync a folder
on your hard drive, and then follow up with unsync when it gets too large, and
then set up a new folder for the next batch.

------
ctdonath
Amazon Glacier seems applicable at this point: around $1000/mo to archive the
entire Everpix collection, then work out (cheap) pricing for people to
retrieve their photos. Just a thought, pursuant to not losing everything
outright.

~~~
acjohnson55
Might not be a bad idea considering the user presumably still has their
pictures on disk when they want to browse the whole collection.

------
dublinben
I can't help but think that their reliance on (very expensive) Amazon Web
Services played a part in their collapse. It looks like they also failed to
grow enough, but it should have been possible to sustain a paying service.

~~~
citricsquid
If you look at the figures in this verge article it looks like the S3 costs
were almost immaterial.

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-
and-d...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-death-
inside-the-worlds-best-photo-startup#paragraph31)

~~~
sameer_sundresh
That's right. AWS infrastructures costs were already being covered by
subscription income. We also had prototypes ready to flesh out to reduce per-
user costs as we scale up, but were not at that point yet.

~~~
gobbluth
If the only problem was scale... how is it even possible that a VC didn't
invest? You had a proven product, fanatically loyal customers (including
myself), and unbelievable growth potential. Everpix is a textbook case for
venture capital.

Even more amazing to me is why someone like Apple didn't purchase Everpix.
They're in desperate need of competent web services, and god knows they have
the cash. Of all possible futures for Everpix, I could never have seen
outright shuttering as a possibility.

~~~
sameer_sundresh
There's two levels to the scale problem: (a) sufficient scale for a successful
small business, and (b) sufficient scale to repay a whole VC fund, with
interest. VCs agreed that (a) was achievable, but they really need (b) and
didn't see that with us.

Tools for private photo collections are important, but don't have the same
sort of explosive viral growth curve of, say, a public social network. Even
private social networks have a more difficult time scaling up quickly compared
to the more open but less privacy-respecting alternatives.

~~~
gobbluth
Even so, Everpix is a tool that literally everyone needs -- organization,
deduplication, backup, and daily refreshers of all your photos. I was
contemplating buying a subscription for my elderly mother, since she has no
idea where her pictures are or how to access them. To say nothing of the rest
of my social network.

Maybe I'm still in mourning, but if I ran a VC fund, Everpix seems like a sure
investment. You certainly had much more potential for growth -- and steady
revenue -- than another Instagram clone or internet radio service. And once
your growth eclipsed your fixed costs (which could have been reduced further
by running your own servers when you reached an appropriate size), you'd be
consistently profitable. And since Everpix provided such a valuable service,
your customers would advertise on your behalf.

However, even I discovered Everpix only a few weeks ago, just before The Verge
published a write-up about cloud photo backups -- and crowned Everpix the
winner. You were just reaching a critical mass of followers... I can't help
but think Everpix would have been a wild success if it stuck around for just
another year.

------
cbhl
Users of this service may want to consider setting up an installation of
Trovebox (formerly OpenPhoto). You can grab the sources from
[https://github.com/photo](https://github.com/photo) and host it yourself, or
sign up for a paid hosted account at
[https://trovebox.com/](https://trovebox.com/).

~~~
leejoramo
Looks like the TroveBox hosted service has increase price dramatically, and
going for a more professional market.

------
tombot
As someone who had 10,000+ photos in the service and was recommending Everpix
to everyone I'm pretty sad. Really was set and forget software, used it
regularly to dig out photos and share with others. Super sad that it's going
away, hopefully I can find another service which is half as good

------
InclinedPlane
Until a company sets up a separate trust designed specificially for handling
ongoing long-term operations it's never going to be reasonable to trust a
company will continue to host your content for any reasonable amount of time.

It also strikes me as ... odd? I guess that we have these examples of
companies declaiming they will be around "forever", they even put it in their
name, and yet only surviving for about 27 months. It reminds me of teenagers
in "love".

It'll be nice when, if ever, the industry matures out of this state.

------
jrnkntl
Here's a wild thought: open source the client apps, so maybe it can be
rewritten to work with Flickr or any other service. That way it keeps the 'set
it and forget it' alive. Because right now I can't think of a tool that does
the same so smoothly for Flickr.

------
keithwarren
If you were an Everpix fan I would love to hear from you, our startup Pivotal
([http://pivotal.ws](http://pivotal.ws)) is doing something very similar and
we would love to hear what you liked and didnt like about Everpix and how you
would make it better.

~~~
armandososa
I liked everything about Everpix, except that they didn't charge enough to
keep the lights on. Please don't make the same mistake. I'd want to trust you.

~~~
keithwarren
We are looking at 9.95, 19.95 and 35.95 a month based on storage levels and
other benefits.

The 'other' benefits is something that sets us apart, with our service you get
to choose some photos each month and we will mail 3x5 copies to you (or you
can have them sent to someone else like parents or grandparents), monthly
merchandising deals like 75% off a photo book or calendar.

~~~
gsharma
PictureLife manages pricing based on storage. One of the things I liked about
Everpix was that it was $5/mo no limits (AFAIK). If you can figure out a no
limit pricing that would be great, it doesn't have to be $5/mo.

I am also a Flickr Pro member. I always thought Flickr+Everpix was a great
combination. You can always create a set of apps (desktop/mobile) and have
users connect with Flickr accounts to store the pictures. I won't mind paying
one time $50-100 for a good Flickr uploader that works more like Everpix.

~~~
GrinningFool
It seems to me that "no limits" scales when you can expect people to average
out their usage. But when people just _accumulate_ usage I'd suspect that it
becomes harder to sustain. There has to come a known point where a user is
costing more than they're paying - and when every active user is bound to
reach that point sooner or later, I can't see it could be sustained.

------
terhechte
Sigh, I really liked Everpix. I was just about to move some of my older data
into the cloud and "go full in". This is really sad to hear. You guys build a
great product, sad to see it go.

Edit: I purchased the yearly $40 plan and would definitely have continued
paying / using.

------
vojant
I think we have deeper issue here: Users expect services to be cheap (because
it's internet) and founders give them it using investors money. After they use
all money they just shut down. Everpix is only another example.

------
gilesvangruisen
Just signed up less than 12 hours ago. Cool.

~~~
nathanduvall
Same here. The last of my 50,000+ photos just finished uploading. Just my
luck.

------
clarkdave
I really liked Everpix as a "fire and forget" method for backing up my photos.
It's a shame they're shutting down.

As an alternative I'll probably switch to Dropbox, who have been improving
their 'photo upload' features, one of which is the ability to automatically
upload from iPhoto (similar to how Everpix did it).

One of my favourite features in Everpix was the "1 year ago today" emails they
sent, which picked a few random photos from a year ago and dropped them in my
inbox. That was a really nice touch.

~~~
3JPLW
It was a 'this day in history' — not only was it one year ago, it was any
photo taken on that day. Which was even more awesome. I have 15 year old
photos in my library. It was really cool to slowly relive long-passed
vacations and trips that way. Very sad to see them go.

------
kunle
Surprised Yahoo didn't buy them

------
cyanbane
I tried them for about 3 months, was not a bad service. I had some issues with
the methods in which they allowed for navigation of photos and how easy (or
hard) it was to find a specific photo in a large collection. I ended up going
back to Flickr. That being said, the display UI was great and I had hoped to
see them pressuring other sites in the same space. Good luck to the team in
whatever they decide to work on next.

------
alphakappa
This is sad. Everpix was a fantastic solution to a common problem, so it's
unfortunate that even with such good execution, they couldn't go anywhere.

------
Osmium
I really liked Everpix and was a paying customer. A real shame. I appreciate
that they're giving refunds.

I used it as my photo library in the cloud. I have far too many photos to put
on my phone, but it was nice to be able to look them up to show people when
I'm out. Not sure what to use now! Flickr? To be honest, there isn't another
service I trust to keep my photos private, and that's what Everpix was billed
as.

------
nl
Next someone complains (again!) about an aquihire on HN, and how it means the
company is shutting down I'll just point at this as the alternative.

------
thomaspun
I never use their service but I have been following them. It's sad to see them
go as I think they have a good product.

From the comments, there seems to be a consensus on not charging enough. It'd
be interesting to hear from the team why they didn't try charging more or even
going thru the crowd funding route.

------
alariccole
As someone who has been working on sort of a competitor...this makes me sad.
Everpix was a great tool, such a great tool that it helped push my company in
a different direction. I would've been very proud to build what they did.

~~~
keithwarren
Building a competitor as well ([http://pivotal.ws](http://pivotal.ws))

------
hobs
While it isnt photo specific, backblaze is an awesome way to backup
everything, and have a simple and quick interface for restoring your data. You
can even buy hard drives with all your data on it from them, pretty cool.

------
nawitus
December 15th, 2013 seems like a too little time. A two month vacation might
mean that someone loses all of his photos, even though one of the main points
of this kind of service is backup of photos.

~~~
venomsnake
This is usually how running out of money works. If they had 6 months runway
they wouldn't shut down the company.

------
spaetzel
Very disappointing. I've been promoting Everpix to my friends and family, and
had paid for an annual plan myself.

Will need to hunt down a new alternative.

------
j2bax
Well thats disappointing. This looks like the service I've been looking for
for all these years.

------
smaili
Very sad news to hear. Best of luck to everyone on the team.

------
brianjolney
just started using them, the platform was actually really interesting and well
developed. sad to see them go...

------
dr0p
really sad. They messed up on a lot of aspects but build a great product.

------
raghus
[https://www.thislife.com/](https://www.thislife.com/)

Pricing is here:
[https://www.thislife.com/pricing](https://www.thislife.com/pricing)

Disclosure: I work at SFLY

~~~
sutterbomb
For clarity, raghus' disclosure was about working for Shutterfly, who acquired
ThisLife earlier in 2013.

------
libovness
This sounds cruel, but Everpix was effectively operating as a Ponzi scheme.
They offered services (photo storage) that they couldn't afford unless new
money came in. Then the money stopped.

~~~
swisspol
Actually, Everpix was making around $40K / month from subscription revenue
covering the infrastructure costs for both free and paid users with some
margin. The problem is (obviously) having enough to cover fixed costs as well
i.e. mostly personnel costs.

~~~
awad
The personnel costs of a 7 person startup really jumped out at me. Am I the
only one that was surprised?

~~~
72deluxe
No, I thought the personnel costs / salaries was bonkers too.

EDIT: I read some of the comments on the Verge's page and it seems that the
salaries were over a few years, and apparently that isn't bonkers money! I
must be out of touch.

