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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

So they must have some form of business model, right? All I can see on their website is that everything is for free, even their API which can be used for free without any limits or restrictions. And given the already huge Imgix costs, abusing or over-using their API to request and resize images would directly increase their overall costs. According to Crunchbase (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unsplash#section-fun...) they raised $10m last year, but they must be churning through $3m+ per year on staffing and hosting costs.

I use and love the service but I can't see how it can last for more than a few more years.

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"He said it’s too soon to know exactly what that [business] model will be, but it will involve blockchain technology and cryptocurrency" [1]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...

Is there a way I can short this company?

My uneducated guess would be that they have no outstanding stock, as they have not done an IPO. So you can't short against their zero public stock.

I think the way to do this for VC companies is to sell them expensive stuff until they go out of business. This post and many others like it seem to indicate it works well.

This reminds me of Soundcloud a few years ago when they were giving away API access for free for unlimited plays but then were almost close to bankrupt and pretty much shut down all API plays. I ended up shutting down my 3rd party app then but not sure what's their API limits now. Twitter recently made huge changes to their API limits too which impacted a lot of 3rd party apps.

I hope Unsplash doesn't end up similar to those.

On the note of Twitter's restriction of API usage, Jack talked about it recently on the podcast Tales from the Crypt [0]. He doesn't give any specifics but attributes Twitters early struggle with uptime to unrestricted API usage [1].

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-from-the-crypt/i...

[1] https://overcast.fm/+KiHpBJHGo/15:30

That seems silly to me. They could have easily served their api from another server.

I imagine the problem wasn't API servers but data access.

I meant both api servers and database replica.

> He doesn't give any specifics but attributes Twitters early struggle with uptime to unrestricted API usage.

Of course, that was also critical to Twitter's success.

Jack has proven himself a liar many times with his false promises regarding taking care of the abuse problem on his platform without success so I’d take anything he says with a pinch of salt.

Let’s also not forget that they have a vendetta against third-party clients (so they can push their own client with the bullshit algorithmic timeline and ads) so it wouldn’t surprise me that he says that just as an excuse. In reality their web access was just as unrestricted as their API so it should share some of the blame too.

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