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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

How is this ransom? You just have to pay money to use their service. $35 a month isn't a lot of money for anything remotely serious.

Also, photobucket has a $10 a month plan for up to 100GB of image storage that supports "unlimited linking". Most forums won't need more than that. Nothing about this pricing page looks extortionate to me: http://photobucket.com/pricing

Maybe I'm missing something important here, but to me it looks like some people have a very rigid view of what online services ought to cost.

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I think the ransom is that people have been using Photobucket to host images posted on forums for 10+ years, often hotlinked. Suddenly all of those historical hotlinks are going to break unless each user pays $400/year.

Changing the terms is one thing, but I think OP is upset that old images aren't grandfathered.

Also, I know one obvious solution is to just move all of one's images to a new host and edit the posts, but not all forums allow editing very old posts, some threads will be locked, etc.

If the issue is that the traffic costs money, grandfathering old images doesn't solve the root problem.

You're right, it doesn't, and the bandwidth of image hosting at that scale clearly costs someone real dollars. It's hard to imagine a good solution to the hotlinked historical images problem.

Maybe a futureproof one is to maintain one's one domain with image urls that redirect to the user's current host. I think this is the best approach for book publishers. It's always frustrating to read references to blog posts etc from a book more than a few years old and then find the links are broken from a third party not maintaining the domain or changing it. Link rot is a real problem we don't talk about much.

They probably consider it ransom because the terms were changed after the relationship was established.

Unlimited linking probably doesn't include embedding.

So, if they were on a lower end plan, something that used to be offered was taken away. After they invested time in uploading and embedding lots of images.

Terms are _always_ subject to change.

We're talking about 1 dollar per day for image hosting here. These panicky reactions seem totally overblown to me. I don't think this is really about the price as an absolute number. This is more of an emotional reaction about the price changing, which some people feel is fundamentally unfair.

There's also a note that getting your images out to move them to another provider is deliberately difficult.

In any case, how most photobucket users feel about it will ultimately matter more than what we outside observers think.

$1/day is not an insignificant amount for a lot of people, especially around the world. Hell, paying anything can be a difficult proposition when you don't have a CC.

Also, that's just for one image hoster. If it catches on, a person who used a few over the years would have to pay thousands per year to avoid losing links.

But you're right that's not just about the money.

> $1/day is not an insignificant amount

Especially considering nearly everything has a monthly fee attached these days.

$3 here, $5 there, $9.99 over there. Of course businesses should be paid for the services they offer, but as a consumer those numbers add up quickly, and in that context a subscription in the $30/$40 range is non-trivial, even for someone with a first world salary.

I can't imagine they provide that level of value, but that's just my opinion.

Terms are certainly subject to change, however users have a right to feel a bit abused given that this service effectively engaged in a bait and switch -- undercut competitors, get it heavily used and entrenched, apply or increase costs.

Ah, yes, the old ten year long-con bait and switch.

I enjoy the sarcasm, but it most certainly is. We see it constantly with services that have no revenue plan and heavily promote entrenchment -- the duration before they start turning the screws will vary in their runway, investors, and how long other ventures can keep it afloat, but it absolutely is a form of bait and switch, and it's endemic in the startup industry.

PG notoriously has stated a number of times that you don't need to even think about revenue, much less income -- just get users. You can do the switch later, whether it's blanketing with ads (see imgur), subscription plans, etc.

no not emotional it is financial i dont have another 40.00 a month to pay photobucket for its crappy service a site that is down at least 2 or 3 times a month or incredibly slow so that i literally cant work for that day making new listings not to mention all the broken links to in my listings i either HAVE TO PAY 400.00 a month instead of 2.99 or lose 3 years of work

Because they made their money and their fame by providing a way for users to embed photos in other sites for free in a very classic bait and switch (see: ImageShack in 2010 and Imgur in 2020 [0]).

[0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/what-happens-when-imgur-goes-...

Bear in mind that this is not a fee for _forums_ to pay (where $400 a month for image embedding could be reasonable). This is a fee for the _users_ to pay, to be able to embed the images on their Photobucket accounts elsewhere on the web.

I doubt many users would be interested in paying $35 for the "linking" version (which is literally just links, not embedding), let alone the $400 version.

I'm not seeing a $35 linking version...it's $100/year. The "no links / no embedding" plan is $60/year, which is just hilarious for 50GB of mostly useless storage. http://photobucket.com/pricing

Ah, yeah even more so, I was just going on what the preceding comment said.

it is 400.00 a year for image linking. no linking or embedding with any less expensive plan

You could pay amazon $35 a month for 100GB storage and about 70m hits per month, or 27req/s sustained for your images...

At more usual numbers of a few million hits per month, cut that by 10x or so

And a 2nd hand 200GB hard drive from ebay costs 5 bucks. That's not comparable though, because Photobucket offers many image related services. Maybe forum operators aren't interested any of those services and they should be using a dumb storage provider instead.

It's not forum operators using Photobucket. It's the user of the forum.

I wasn't really trying to compare photobucket and s3 feature wise anyway, just highlighting that the price is completely out of proportion for the cost to host and distribute those images even with a cloud provider.

A lot of the use probably is not all that serious in volume and "locked" to hotlinking. Suddenly requiring quite a lot of money for hotlinking is quite a big change.

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