Hmm, I should actually make it even better and add an RSS feed to your own images, or you can use the API to list the latest ones and download the ones you're missing (no need to keep redownloading everything every time).
Also these would be authenticated, nobody should be able to discover which images you have uploaded. The RSS feed and API listing would be for you only.
I'm talking about things like Imgur, which now won't even let you upload images on mobile web (I assume their mobile app does), and instead insists you "make a post" for their reddit-style social network thing.
There are some other free alternatives, but they aren't very reliable, and it's generally been a bit frustrating because the elephant in the room is that image hosting doesn't make money unless the user pays. So, I figured I might as well address it head-on.
Imgur really jumped the shark by doubling down on social features. Image hosting has seen a lot of players come and go. It’s a simple service complicated by business.
The Craigslist model comes to mind. Looks the same, works the same, and cheap to run compared to their traffic volumes.
> Imgur really jumped the shark by doubling down on social features.
I don't know if you can blame them (then again, that hasn't stopped my IMGZ character from doing it), nobody's going to pay to upload memes and they have to make money somehow, and social was one alternative. There aren't many ways to monetize serving an image...
If you want to talk about Imgur.com being shady, they make their mobile site slower on purpose than the desktop site... combined with multiple "download our app for a faster experience" ad plastered on it...
> Imgur, which now won't even let you upload images on mobile web
They hide the upload from the mobile views but if you go directly to https://imgur.com/upload you can upload from there even on mobile.
I agree that Imgur has become quite terrible though, and I think it’s a consequence of offering the service for free as they do. They have a lot of users and serve a lot of traffic, and they need to cover their bills and make a living somehow.
I hope to see your paid service thrive and be able to offer a good service and user experience to those of us who are willing to pay. I think your service has a good chance of being able to succeed.
Select "view desktop site" and you can still upload images on mobile.
<side rant>Personally I can't stand mobile versions of pages, anyway. I use "view desktop version" for everything, and pan and zoom as needed</side rant>
The second alternative non-shady financial model for image/video hosting is relying on donations, eg. https://catbox.moe/ . The site currently receives $322/month on patreon.
This is true. I hint to it in the terms, but I didn't want to break character too much. Basically, I take precautions for both, but it's a one-man side-project, so caveat emptor. Also, images are obviously public (though unlisted), so it's not meant for sensitive data storage.
I will let you know. Good thing I made it so easy for potential buyers, huh? I don't know why more services don't do this, I mean, if you're going for a big exit, why not allow credit card payment?
I do like the tone of barely suppressed rage. With a bit of advertising you can become the Pinboard of image hosting as others go through the failure cycle.
"I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)"
I remember when imgur started as well, it was born out of the same sentiment, but chose an unsustainable financial model (in my opinion). I think $5/yr strikes a good balance between "an easy place to share some images" and "not expensive enough that the average person will have trouble paying".
I thought about doing this as a form of easily managed passive income.
But then I remembered: copyright takedown requests and child pornography. Keeping on top of bad actors with an image host sounds like a huge headache! And if you grow that means you have to hire people, and then how do you keep the price so low?
I'm not a Google fan by any means, but you might explore the Content Safety API [1] they're offering to partners. Thorn might also offer something similar [2].
That's exactly why I built this, because I wanted a no-hassle way to share images. It also has a very convenient CLI utility (pip install imgz-cli) that lets you upload with one command, or from various apps or whatnot. There's also a very simple API.
It's aspirational! I meant to write the CLI in it but I'm better with Python so expediency won, but I do hope to write some of it in Rust at some point.
Nice work! I appreciate your tone, the project, and everything. Heck, I appreciate you man.
(Subscribing now...)
Also this is a great idea and really needed. It’s amazing that something so simple is hard to implement without the shady factor. Resist the temptation to grow and take VC and do all those things that will sour your soul.
Hah. Erm.. not sure how that’s broken it’s just a page with a form on it..
Yeah the site it redirects to needs a fair share of love. Honestly might shutter it if OP’s site works well for me, I too just wanted a place to bung images that wasn’t imgur
You just need a free tier. No way out of that. I am not paying you even $0.01 if I need to upload 2 memes and share it with 5 people. I can afford it but not gonna happen. Here is ideas: make it a subscription. Allow free hosting with no registration but let the image expire (unhost) after N views and rate limit clients. Don't freaking ask me for my email. No, I do not care what your reason is kind sir. It is 2020 basically, don't ask me for my email. Just process the payment and give me a key I can use for futue uploads,ask me to optionally email but man i hate that so much. I don't see why I need any account other than an access token,but even if I do why do I need to give yet another imposing site my email? How about random 5 character subdomains for for payinf accounts and a premium fee for being able to choose the subdomain? All images uploaded with a token get the same subdomain?
Look, I haven't looked too deep into what you do and your business model but with imgur I can still upload pictures for free,which I can link to directly and I quite like being able to share it and have others up/down vote it as a post. You don't do that. Imgur was specifically started because the founder, much like you was frustrated with all the b.s. image hosting options available when uploading to reddit. Right now only people who care about not being the product will pay to use this. Even though I am very much one of those people I can never use it since I am not a frequent image uploader. From what I have seen it replaces imgur as much as a dirt cheap shared webhost does.
But I do applaud your api and acceptance of btc payments. And I subjectively am not impressed by your UI either. Just not attractive.
Fyi: I made these comments tk try and provide honest critique that might be useful to OP.
Pretty sure you're not his target customer then. I'm giving this a whirl with the free trial and will probably end up paying for it, it absolutely replaces imgur for me.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, you have a choice. You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI, pay for IMGZ or pay and set up a VPS yourself. For me, the best option was #2, but it didn't exist, so I made it.
And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer!
I dislike a lot of things about imgur, you can't even save a gif on mobile. I would rather use an alternative. I might pay if the service meets my needs. But I have to use btc, which many don't realize can cost 4-5x more than what you charge. For example $10 for me means I have to get btc for $50 to avoid using creditcard(they charge many times more to use cash,etc.... Than using creditcard on an exchange which also asks for ID.)
I do that for other services but it does not change how I have to spend more,which is fine but more is more and I will spend only if it really solves my needs.
> And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer.
I don't know, I just tried it quickly on my mobile and everything was smooth. If you hire a designer be sure to get a good one so they don't ruin the simple use case experience.
It's smooth and quick because I bought a $10 theme and removed all the Javascript, it just looks like crap because I suck at design. I'm glad it worked well for you, though, since the reality is I'll probably never afford a designer from the $30/mo this is going to bring in.
So is btc... You will need to be much more proactive about that. I can easily get a burner phone i cash, register gmail with it, buy btc , buy vpn with btc and upload to your site. There are better ways to manage and police fraud and crime (ML can very easily detect age and human body -- require human review if ML flags it before hosting it). Or better yet ban all nsfw like tumblr
> You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI
What's so bad about the Imgur UI?
I find it extremely pleasing, all I need to do is go to imgur.com and simply drag an image onto the page and there's a publicly avaible link basically available forever... for free
Also, they're original slogan shows how much they cared about improving the experience.... "Imgur: The image sharer that doesn't suck!"
If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that.
There are children and people from non-western countries who have trouble accessing payment options, I'll give you that.
> You just need a free tier. No way out of that
No, you need a free tier. Doesn't mean that imgz needs a free tier. Especially if their target market is "people who are already fed up with one of the free hosts".
> If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that.
Now that makes little sense. Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments? You can create an account on the backend,plenty of sites already allow for guest check outs with no email asked so I don't get what you're on about. Email is a humongous ask for me. I will even pay double to avoid that. No, it is not useful for payment reminders,those are spammy to me. This is why you need to let people opt in! I don't want to give you any email addresses. You will decide some day how valuable your collection of emails and pictures is and you will sale it to the highesr bidder. Even if it is a paid service how can I know you won't get greedy. Also wake up please! Assume email does not exist unless you need to tell users something,and they give consent. You do not need email to host images. I do not wish to use a burner email for your lack of consideration for my consent. I do not wish to receive emails from an image host. If you need email for antifraud you're screwing it up already and I would rather just use AD supported free services because at least they are not tracking me by my email -- a very valuable datapoint for trackers. Once you have my email you can do micro-targeting very easily and basically figure out all there is to know about me. You do not need people's email unless they say they want you to email them. Heck, even if I want your reminders, email is the last way I want to use. Send me login/push notifications. I do not want to expose yet another site to account take over in the event my email is compromised. I seen people lose a lot of moneu because criminals phished their email. If I am paying you with btc, I do not wish to have any billing reminders or anything tracing the transaction to my email! Trust me,please! You do not need email unless you really and specifically with user consent (after a warning dialog) have a reason to use it. Please stop. Not one more decade of ignorance with respect to this subject.
Oh and yeah, I need a free tier but so does OP. That's how you get users. The more you have free tier users, the more users convert to paying and the more sustainable the service becomes.
> Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments?
I think you might want to care because that's a basic requirement of any legal business (or non-profit) pretty much anywhere.
The service is also time-limited. Would you pay some amount for images to be hosted for a limited time? That seems like a perfectly valid decision.
It may not be feasible to accept anonymous payments or accept credit card payments without at least an email address.
Also, services like this must necessarily 'bundle' their specific products, e.g. hosting individual images in the case of this site. The transaction costs, e.g. credit card payment processing fees, preclude charging too small amounts.
Maybe it would be possible to avoid requiring an email address, but then I'd expect they'd have to use your credit card 'fingerprint' as an account/user identifier. But I'm skeptical that any credit card processors would allow that, especially given the possibility (and likelihood) that people will upload illegal images like child pornography.
B.s., how does protonmail/vpn let me create accounts without a prior email? They do sms verification or arbitrary donation for antifraud. Yes, like an expiring paste, i don't care if an image i shared expires after a while. This site and many others accept btc payment. It is also a growing trend to allow guest checkouts without registration. A business needs to keep records but that is a backend problem,you can record individual transactions with unique IDs and be done with it. Unless you're in finance you don't need to track users (money laundering)
Also, an email or other means for the service to contact you, the user, is necessary for account recovery. Building a SaaS product without any efficient way to recover a lost password is silly. It leads to a ton of customer service headaches.
No it is not! You do not need and should not use email for password recovery. Ok, let's say you do that, what happens when you have 2FA? Both factors of authentication will be thwarted if your email is compromised? That is ridiculous! There are practical and simple solutions (such as recovery tokens, push notifications,etc...). Look, I don't you realize how often people's email gets compromised and how many intermediaries read and log email bodies. There are efficient ways. I mean ffs, do you need a valid email to sign up for email providers?? How do they handle resets? There arr many ways. The only thing worse than email is "secret" questions.
> If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that.
This is obviously a somewhat niche use case, but given you accept Bitcoin, you might be open to it.
I'd love to be able to upload files for a very small fee (few pennies) with no account, and then allow anyone with a link to the file to top up the hosting funds for the image. If you run a lightning node, this would be perfectly feasible for sub-penny amounts.
> allow anyone with a link to the file to top up the hosting funds for the image
This is a genuinely differentiating feature and might be useful even without the Bitcoin aspect. It's easy to imagine someone being annoyed by a deep linked image going away - but being able to pay to revive it.
I agree. You likely could tackle this by requiring users to have accounts that they can deposit funds into (with some minimum to avoid credit card fees), and distribute to pages.
The big advantage with microtransactions is that users don't need accounts.
There's a strategy I only saw applied [twice, forgot another team was using this somewhere else] but I've been stumping for it every place else (I may almost have my current team convinced)
If you segregate classes of service (consumer/producer/admin, or paying/non-paying), then you can over-allocate one class of service to guarantee responsiveness. The most obvious cost is that you need monitoring to make sure all classes of service are working, but you tend to have that anyway.
With this structure, the HN hug of death still leaves your admin console running even while the public traffic is falilng over. Logged in users can still modify content. Or in the case of an image service, paying customers are undersubscribed and free tier is oversubscribed.
In my situation, the customers are responsible for most of the CPU load on the system. We could throttle them while keeping their customer's requests highly responsive.
> Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur. You just need a free tier. No way out of that.
Having a free tier is what turned imgur into the mess that it is now. When it start it was a no-bullshit image host. But how do you host images for free?
Recovery token. It can optionally be emailed but you will be advised to write it down on paper -- this is already done with some 2FA auth. Let me flip tables:what if someone got access to your email and took over your image hosting account. How will you recover? Now they have access to private images and they can host illegal content and you will have to prove in court your account was taken over.
I like pen and paper because you can lock it away somewhere safe. If your physical security is bad anyways, no recovery method can help you. Offline,simple and unhackable.
I'll send you a screenshot from my Inbox so you can see how it compares to other mailing lists. hello is not bad, it could just be a bit more descriptive so I know it comes from Imgz.
Yup; don't mind a little informality, but all this shit and asses and fucks are trying too hard, don't really want to give my money to a project that markets itself as this hypercool.
Ah, the MPAA way. It's hard to get the "angry owner" tone out with one swear, one swear says "professional but kind of flustered". I don't like gratuitous swearing either, but I think I got it right with the copy there (at least for my aesthetic).
It's been a while since I read all of it at once, though, I wil re-read and adjust, thanks.
The language is fine. I actually find it much more refreshing than the usual onslaught on buzzword laden services that pop up on HN. You can edit the language as much as you want, the puritans won't be satisfied.
If this is your hobby project, I doubt you are looking for enterprise signups who are pretty anal about such things. This will mostly used by individuals, who mostly wouldn't mind at worst, or be amused by it at best.
Oh I agree with you 100%, it's just that this copy has gone through various iterations, and you need to step back once in a while and read all of it to see if it blends together well, which I haven't done in a while.
I, too, dislike people who try to be funny by cursing, because it feels facile. I just read the copy again now and there were a few cases where the cursing felt gratuitous, rather than for a specific effect, so I have changed those.
I found it humorous. The last thing I want to see is yet another startup website using artificially enthusiastic copy to sell their plans. All that tells me is that they're just waiting for their own Imgur moment.
That's not to say that this site may be headed there as well, but at least we can enjoy some irreverent copy in the meantime.
A free image host doesn't give me much confidence in the guarantee of "image will not expire". Also, I don't like how me and my 10 images are on the same free tier as the guy abusing the service with 1,000,000s of images.
This is also my problem with Discord: no way to give them money as a server operator. So every time there's downtime or API issues, I think of the Discord servers I've been to where children are literally spamming a channel as fast as they can and I get annoyed that there's no way for me to get a better, paid tier for my server where we're trying to do some serious work.
Having no business model or hiding it from the user (I didn't see a /pricing page) does not seem like "no bullshit" to me. It just reeks of borrowed time, ephemeral weekendware, or VC funding.
You should care about your images and that's all. You have no need to worry about the guy abusing the service with his 1M images, that's the owner of said service problem.
As for confidence in service I can tell you I use it for at least 5 years and still can access those images. For a free service I'd say is quite good. I don't have earlier images since I discovered the site only 5 years ago so I can't speak for higher image retention time.
This definitely already happened 100%, I bet meanwhile the owner(s) of postimages.org dealt with and they still up. So I worry about my images and that's it.
What if I need absolute surety my image(s) is not going to be subject to bit rot and not be available in a few years time? What if I do 'multi-posts' and share the same image across 10,000+ bulletin boards? Your bandwidth will run out very quickly if you saw the types of posting that I do (I use automation software to post to 10,000+ boards). And those posts last for decades. I am not sure I can rely on this service for my needs.
This is why I self-host my own image server and have it hooked up to a well-provisioned CDN for peace of mind. Then I have full control and can renew the domain for ten years each time to keep the images online.
If you needed such guarantees, I'd reckon you'd want to proxy through a domain name you control, anyways. I wouldn't trust the URL structure of a given image host to last decades, either. Or a given image host's hot-linking tolerance to stay the same.
Wow, never thought I'd meet ME in hackernews.
This is exactly what I do. I have a domain with a few services running and upload everything to that, then get a hyperlink to it to embed/raw post everywhere.
Also you probably don't want every image you want to share on the internet coming from the same S3 bucket. And you don't want to pay S3/Cloudfront pricing so you'll probably want to put Cloudflare in front of it. Etc, etc.
I'm guessing you're thinking about discoverablity? I think the comment to which you were replying was pointing out that you might want to serve different images out of different buckets (e.g. because they have different audiences) or use a different bucket for images versus other content.
But if you're happy with just using whatever S3 bucket you have, then there's no reason to switch.
What does the audience have to do with anything? Why are you mixing application layer concerns with data storage concerns? It’s like saying you want images for one audience served from Azure but another audience served from AWS. It makes no difference, it’s all just data and bits stored somewhere and served out. Might as well just put it all in the same place. Could easily be the same bucket.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
254 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadQuestion: Can I get a tarball or some other dump of customer data? (Well, I can't, not being a customer yet. But if we overlook that detail.)
I guess I'll sign up next time I would have uploaded to Imgur. Thanks.
Also these would be authenticated, nobody should be able to discover which images you have uploaded. The RSS feed and API listing would be for you only.
There are some other free alternatives, but they aren't very reliable, and it's generally been a bit frustrating because the elephant in the room is that image hosting doesn't make money unless the user pays. So, I figured I might as well address it head-on.
The Craigslist model comes to mind. Looks the same, works the same, and cheap to run compared to their traffic volumes.
https://www.developerfusion.com/media/76730/how-craigslist-w...
I don't know if you can blame them (then again, that hasn't stopped my IMGZ character from doing it), nobody's going to pay to upload memes and they have to make money somehow, and social was one alternative. There aren't many ways to monetize serving an image...
They hide the upload from the mobile views but if you go directly to https://imgur.com/upload you can upload from there even on mobile.
I agree that Imgur has become quite terrible though, and I think it’s a consequence of offering the service for free as they do. They have a lot of users and serve a lot of traffic, and they need to cover their bills and make a living somehow.
I hope to see your paid service thrive and be able to offer a good service and user experience to those of us who are willing to pay. I think your service has a good chance of being able to succeed.
<side rant>Personally I can't stand mobile versions of pages, anyway. I use "view desktop version" for everything, and pan and zoom as needed</side rant>
On another note, can I buy equity/get hired for equity only? I like your chances at a buyout, and I want in.
It seems so simple, yet nobody does it! Perplexing.
> On another note, can I buy equity/get hired for equity only? I like your chances at a buyout, and I want in.
Definitely not, buster! I'm keeping those sweet sweet shares. Unless you're a VC, in which case take all of them!
"I got fed up with all the other image hosts out there so I made my own. It doesn't force you to compress your images, and it has neat things like crop, resize, rotate, and compression from 10-100. It's my gift to you. Let's not see anymore imageshack/photobucket around here ;)"
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_t...
1: https://imgz.org/iJKuc6HA.png
But then I remembered: copyright takedown requests and child pornography. Keeping on top of bad actors with an image host sounds like a huge headache! And if you grow that means you have to hire people, and then how do you keep the price so low?
Good luck!
[1] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/using...
[2] https://www.thorn.org/
I now host my own images, but I will share this link with my friends who can't/won't selfhost images.
Where’s the rust? What is it used for? I couldn’t find it on the repo.
Gotta keep the fanboys happy.
PS : I guess there is a typo in the pricing options, the most expensive should offer 1TB instead of 1GB
(Subscribing now...)
Also this is a great idea and really needed. It’s amazing that something so simple is hard to implement without the shady factor. Resist the temptation to grow and take VC and do all those things that will sour your soul.
Also nobody is going to offer me VC money for a weekend project, so you're safe!
Yeah the site it redirects to needs a fair share of love. Honestly might shutter it if OP’s site works well for me, I too just wanted a place to bung images that wasn’t imgur
You just need a free tier. No way out of that. I am not paying you even $0.01 if I need to upload 2 memes and share it with 5 people. I can afford it but not gonna happen. Here is ideas: make it a subscription. Allow free hosting with no registration but let the image expire (unhost) after N views and rate limit clients. Don't freaking ask me for my email. No, I do not care what your reason is kind sir. It is 2020 basically, don't ask me for my email. Just process the payment and give me a key I can use for futue uploads,ask me to optionally email but man i hate that so much. I don't see why I need any account other than an access token,but even if I do why do I need to give yet another imposing site my email? How about random 5 character subdomains for for payinf accounts and a premium fee for being able to choose the subdomain? All images uploaded with a token get the same subdomain?
Look, I haven't looked too deep into what you do and your business model but with imgur I can still upload pictures for free,which I can link to directly and I quite like being able to share it and have others up/down vote it as a post. You don't do that. Imgur was specifically started because the founder, much like you was frustrated with all the b.s. image hosting options available when uploading to reddit. Right now only people who care about not being the product will pay to use this. Even though I am very much one of those people I can never use it since I am not a frequent image uploader. From what I have seen it replaces imgur as much as a dirt cheap shared webhost does.
But I do applaud your api and acceptance of btc payments. And I subjectively am not impressed by your UI either. Just not attractive.
Fyi: I made these comments tk try and provide honest critique that might be useful to OP.
And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer!
I don't know, I just tried it quickly on my mobile and everything was smooth. If you hire a designer be sure to get a good one so they don't ruin the simple use case experience.
(Not as the primary model of course, just as an additional payment option)
> And yeah, the UI is trash
Uh, so what exactly is the argument in favor of your service again?
What's so bad about the Imgur UI?
I find it extremely pleasing, all I need to do is go to imgur.com and simply drag an image onto the page and there's a publicly avaible link basically available forever... for free
Also, they're original slogan shows how much they cared about improving the experience.... "Imgur: The image sharer that doesn't suck!"
https://imgz.org/ierYBdLi/
There are children and people from non-western countries who have trouble accessing payment options, I'll give you that.
> You just need a free tier. No way out of that
No, you need a free tier. Doesn't mean that imgz needs a free tier. Especially if their target market is "people who are already fed up with one of the free hosts".
Now that makes little sense. Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments? You can create an account on the backend,plenty of sites already allow for guest check outs with no email asked so I don't get what you're on about. Email is a humongous ask for me. I will even pay double to avoid that. No, it is not useful for payment reminders,those are spammy to me. This is why you need to let people opt in! I don't want to give you any email addresses. You will decide some day how valuable your collection of emails and pictures is and you will sale it to the highesr bidder. Even if it is a paid service how can I know you won't get greedy. Also wake up please! Assume email does not exist unless you need to tell users something,and they give consent. You do not need email to host images. I do not wish to use a burner email for your lack of consideration for my consent. I do not wish to receive emails from an image host. If you need email for antifraud you're screwing it up already and I would rather just use AD supported free services because at least they are not tracking me by my email -- a very valuable datapoint for trackers. Once you have my email you can do micro-targeting very easily and basically figure out all there is to know about me. You do not need people's email unless they say they want you to email them. Heck, even if I want your reminders, email is the last way I want to use. Send me login/push notifications. I do not want to expose yet another site to account take over in the event my email is compromised. I seen people lose a lot of moneu because criminals phished their email. If I am paying you with btc, I do not wish to have any billing reminders or anything tracing the transaction to my email! Trust me,please! You do not need email unless you really and specifically with user consent (after a warning dialog) have a reason to use it. Please stop. Not one more decade of ignorance with respect to this subject.
Oh and yeah, I need a free tier but so does OP. That's how you get users. The more you have free tier users, the more users convert to paying and the more sustainable the service becomes.
Citation needed.
I think you might want to care because that's a basic requirement of any legal business (or non-profit) pretty much anywhere.
The service is also time-limited. Would you pay some amount for images to be hosted for a limited time? That seems like a perfectly valid decision.
It may not be feasible to accept anonymous payments or accept credit card payments without at least an email address.
Also, services like this must necessarily 'bundle' their specific products, e.g. hosting individual images in the case of this site. The transaction costs, e.g. credit card payment processing fees, preclude charging too small amounts.
Maybe it would be possible to avoid requiring an email address, but then I'd expect they'd have to use your credit card 'fingerprint' as an account/user identifier. But I'm skeptical that any credit card processors would allow that, especially given the possibility (and likelihood) that people will upload illegal images like child pornography.
This is obviously a somewhat niche use case, but given you accept Bitcoin, you might be open to it.
I'd love to be able to upload files for a very small fee (few pennies) with no account, and then allow anyone with a link to the file to top up the hosting funds for the image. If you run a lightning node, this would be perfectly feasible for sub-penny amounts.
This is a genuinely differentiating feature and might be useful even without the Bitcoin aspect. It's easy to imagine someone being annoyed by a deep linked image going away - but being able to pay to revive it.
The big advantage with microtransactions is that users don't need accounts.
If you segregate classes of service (consumer/producer/admin, or paying/non-paying), then you can over-allocate one class of service to guarantee responsiveness. The most obvious cost is that you need monitoring to make sure all classes of service are working, but you tend to have that anyway.
With this structure, the HN hug of death still leaves your admin console running even while the public traffic is falilng over. Logged in users can still modify content. Or in the case of an image service, paying customers are undersubscribed and free tier is oversubscribed.
In my situation, the customers are responsible for most of the CPU load on the system. We could throttle them while keeping their customer's requests highly responsive.
Having a free tier is what turned imgur into the mess that it is now. When it start it was a no-bullshit image host. But how do you host images for free?
How do you prove that you are the owner?
If someone manages to log in as you and takes over your account, how do you get it back without giving some method to contact you.
I like pen and paper because you can lock it away somewhere safe. If your physical security is bad anyways, no recovery method can help you. Offline,simple and unhackable.
I understand the author is trying to be cool and all, but this is too much by piling up vulgar words all over, IMO.
EDIT: @StavrosK, consider making the "From" set in your hello email to something prettier than "hello"
This would qualify as PG if it were a movie. I mean, you like what you like, but how much cussing is "just enough" for you?
It's been a while since I read all of it at once, though, I wil re-read and adjust, thanks.
If this is your hobby project, I doubt you are looking for enterprise signups who are pretty anal about such things. This will mostly used by individuals, who mostly wouldn't mind at worst, or be amused by it at best.
I, too, dislike people who try to be funny by cursing, because it feels facile. I just read the copy again now and there were a few cases where the cursing felt gratuitous, rather than for a specific effect, so I have changed those.
I understand the you are trying to be cool and all, but this is too much by piling up vulgar words ("anal") all over, IMO.
That's not to say that this site may be headed there as well, but at least we can enjoy some irreverent copy in the meantime.
This is also my problem with Discord: no way to give them money as a server operator. So every time there's downtime or API issues, I think of the Discord servers I've been to where children are literally spamming a channel as fast as they can and I get annoyed that there's no way for me to get a better, paid tier for my server where we're trying to do some serious work.
Having no business model or hiding it from the user (I didn't see a /pricing page) does not seem like "no bullshit" to me. It just reeks of borrowed time, ephemeral weekendware, or VC funding.
Thus, at least indirectly, it's a potential problem for every user or customer of said owner's service.
This is why I self-host my own image server and have it hooked up to a well-provisioned CDN for peace of mind. Then I have full control and can renew the domain for ten years each time to keep the images online.
Also you probably don't want every image you want to share on the internet coming from the same S3 bucket. And you don't want to pay S3/Cloudfront pricing so you'll probably want to put Cloudflare in front of it. Etc, etc.
But if you're happy with just using whatever S3 bucket you have, then there's no reason to switch.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.