

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

http://www.runway7.net/signs<p>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.<p>Would you pay for this, especially if there was a gem / egg / module that would integrate seamlessly into your projects?
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mattront
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.

~~~
sudhirj
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?

~~~
mattront
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!

~~~
true_religion
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?

\----

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

Would 10 to 15 cents per GB suit your needs?

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true_religion
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.

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makeee
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.

~~~
sudhirj
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

