Why isn't anyone signing up?

I'm trying to think of when I'd want to pay for this.

If I have to put a link to an image somewhere to be able to refer to it anonymously on someone like Reddit or HN (that is, I want someone to see an image, but I don't want to give them a personally-identifiable account) I'm ok posting to Imgur. Sure, I don't like being the product, but I have an ad-block, I do it like twice a year, and it's not enough to pay $12 for.

If I want to actually share photos or something with people I know, I'll use Google Photos.

If I need to share an image with someone professionally, I'll use Google Drive.

The language and messaging is very negative.

- Introduction: In the first line "but are ashamed of what Imgur has become?" why should I be ashamed of imgur?

- Emotional Appeal: If you are referring to a person who is willing to pay a non zero amount of money as "You are cheap" why would one go ahead and press the pay button?

- Screaming I don't care : You seek feedback and state that you might not do anything about it in the same sentence.

I guess you might have actively prevented few willing customers and made them to reconsider their choices.

Boy, I was not expecting the set of comments I'm looking at here.

Folks -- this is _clearly_ sarcasm! This guy could not care less how many people use his service (or at least, he's maintaining a good spirit about how hard it can be).

For what it's worth, I thought it was very funny :)

I realize this is an April Fools Post …

But with that being said, media hosting sites (image, video, even email hosting) become deceptively low margin very fast.

With no ability to purge a users catalog of media, over time - a user become LESS profitable for you (because the more you’re having to store for them, the higher that user costs you).

If new account growth slows, it can create a situation where you are unprofitable.

Just FYI in case anyone is looking to get into this business.

In line with the answers in the FAQ and what other commenters have mentioned this is intentionally made to be hostile and out of touch, and I absolutely love it for that.

There’s not enough humor and parodies in startups and software. Bring it on :)

Also, definitely not paying for a service like this. Especially not with this level of professionalism.

I think I’ll go to the competitor, Oracle Advanced Image Sharing for Hadoop…

Having never heard of this service, I personally had a negative reaction to the name. I think it comes from seeing the z and associating it with warez, aka something illegal.

Ah, damn, I missed this post on the front page! I didn't expect it here, let me reply.

The reason to not pay for this is that there are free alternatives (eg. imgur)

If you need more control, you can just serve the files in your own server and tell couldflare to proxy cache your static files.

For home customers, you can pay for 100GB google drive storage for less than $2/mo

I didn’t even know that this existed. But I upload images for public sharing perhaps once a year or once in two years. So I don’t need this service.

I’m not writing an email as requested in the blog post because that entire post has not even one link to the main page of the service being talked about. Only those who click on one link to another blog post and then navigate to the main page may bother to email.

I think something is deeply missing in the way this blog post is written. And it’s likely that this is not the only post with such deficiencies.

I think the problem may be that if you’re technical enough to want a privacy first static image host, you probably can use S3, GCP, etc.

If you’re not all that technical, you’ll just post to instagram or send on a messaging app.

Maybe some kind of feature with a static page to host images could be useful to folks? Maybe just a service that lets folks host a single image on a domain, even.

I don’t have a use case for this service.

I rarely produce images other than photos, and I don’t like sharing personal photos publicly, like Imgur.

When I share photos, I do via text messages, rarely email nowadays.

I wonder who’s the demographic for this service? Maybe if you define the demographic you could narrow down the message to them.

It’s nearly wordy enough to be seen as an elaborate satire on why tech savvy should pay for an image host.

If you seriously want to bother maintaining a solution your market has out grown then strip it down to pure utility. Remove all copy, branding, colors, and lower price to $2/year.

I have to thank you. Because like you, I had the desire to subvert the mainstream, question normality, and be cool, but I could feel my desire to do so waning after seeing your example. (I'm serious)

I saw the pricing page hit HN about a year ago. I sent it to non tech friends in a group chat as a laugh.

But... I'd never even consider handing over my credit card or other PII to such an obviously blasé admin.

Too difficult to use.

Start with the upload image box then give them a URL

But unlock it only if they then continue to Stripe payment with recurring plan

Only 0.1% will convert but that's OK if you get traffic

As one of the users of imgz, I'm ashamed that I'm not getting ripped off in more than one way. stavros, have you considered IMGZ-coin???

Sigh, yet another business that takes money in exchange for a service. I'm sick of it. I think this site would be much more compelling if I could pay an annual fee, and then get some money back for each image I want to become an ad-riddled social media-ified mess. That way, I could deposit my life savings and use it to top up my bank account whenever I need some liquid cash.

Just add some generative AI to it and the venture funds will throw money at you, then - bah! - who the fuck needs users?!

This actually sounds really appealing to me! Sharing photos with family is generally pretty easy since everyone uses Google photos, but once or twice every year I want to get a photo from someone on IOS and it is a nightmare every single time. If I could send them a link and say "just upload it here and send me back the link it gives you", rather than having to explain for the hundredth time that if they send it in a text it will get turned into a potato, that would be pretty awesome.

Unfortunately I can't tell if that would be possible because either you are hugged to death (at 37 upvotes?) or Cloudflare has decided I'm a robot (maybe I am..)

For what it's worth, the direct, joking, but somehow simultaneously no bullshit tone if the site was incredibly appealing to me. If it had been a bunch of smooth talking "look how we'll solve all your problems" mumbo jumbo like most commercial sites I'd almost certainly have bounced and not even made it as far as commenting here. I'm still a long way from becoming an actual paying user, but I'm interested.

Why has this post disappeared from the front page, dang? :(

Most image sharing is ephemeral. Nobody cares if the image is gone 3 weeks from now, or if some private equity firm destroys the host company entirely in a year. Nobody's going to go through the hoop jumps required to pay for such a service, even just constantly having to re-log-in if you don't use it too often.

This whole thing is a troll as far as I can tell

I thought I recognized that url. Those first two blog posts were some much needed humor in late 2020. Glad to see it’s still a thing. We need more irreverent shit like this.

ibb.co is free

> Then pay for your crap!

Yeah, they may want to reword that.

Yet another image host. That'll work out. Heh.