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Comment by hoahluke | Hacker News Reader

I made this mainly because I wanted a service to use for my own projects - but the existing solutions were either prohibitively expensive or didn't have uptime guarantees.

The backend for the processing service is nodejs and sharp[1], processed images are cached on CloudFlare. The processing servers are a custom instance type in an autoscaling group on Google Cloud.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

[1] https://github.com/lovell/sharp

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Cloudflare does not permit storing just images in any of their plans. Their terms state that serving disproportionate amount of image or video via their service will be violation of their terms. You should check it before using it for longh term or providing cheaper cache options to users.

Ah, great info - thanks for the heads up. I'll dig into that and look into alternatives

@Jimaek commented similar thing. If some big site starts using your service, your promise of unlimited bandwidth can fall flat. Just be cautious and read terms carefully I would say.

Instead of looking for an alternative, why not get in contact with Cloudflare and talk to us about it?

I definitely will do that!

Often when competitors are expensive it's for a reason. Occasionally you'll have stumbled onto an old industry where tech can disrupt things and lower costs, but for cloud-based image serving, everyone is essentially using the same tools and CDNs. You should have a really good reason why you will be able to deliver at a lower cost or with lower margins, otherwise it's likely you will have to end up with the same 'prohibitively expensive' rates, or will go out of business.

Well, from first glance, you're lowest plan is more expensive than imgix's $10/mo minimum. I see now that you have a free plan and I get that you're following the SaaS pricing plan status quo, but if you claim to be a lower-cost competitor, you should make the free plan more prominent.

I have a lot of media-heavy side projects. I use Cloudinary for 1 and imgix for the rest.

It's really hard to compare you price-wise to imgix because you are charging based differently.

One thing I like about imgix is that I can give them access to an S3 bucket and perform transformations on master images that aren't public-read.

Note that sharp uses libvips which happens to be LGPL. I was wondering if this is an issue for commercial products (IANAL).

LGPL is very lenient and especially meant to ease use in/at commercial products.

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