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I designed mockups in Figma, and then realized them into code. At first, there weren't any fancy animations, so I enlisted the help of my friend Rens (info linked in the footer) to help bring it to life!

You absolutely have a point. But for me, I'm not sure how to balance privacy and safety. Is my service really private at all if I'm handing off user files to a third party to do who knows what to scan for bad content, and potentially risk users through false positives?

Edit: A local model could work, but that can be quite compute intensive and therefore expensive.

Yes, I understand there is an unfortunate risk. However, I oppose file scanning, and so do many users, as we've seen with the Apple scandal.

If any content is uploaded that violates the terms of service and is reported, they will be deleted as soon as possible, and that user will almost certainly be permanently banned.

The terms of service also limits my liability.

Yep! Having limits and sustainable pricing was at the top of mind prior to launch - didn't want to dig myself into a hole.

For exports, there are currently 3 export options:

- file download URLs (encrypted content is undecryptable by Horizon, therefore will not be downloadable without the correct key, which is not stored by Horizon)

- all your short links

- all your paste content (encrypted content is undecryptable by Horizon, therefore will show up in its ciphertext form)

These exports are all in machine-readable JSON.

I see your point, but the business model can sustain a large influx in free signups. I will keep this in mind though.

Under the Adult Content section, yes, if there is adult content, the user must be 18 years of age or older. I see the irony in this.

However, for other usage of the site, the privacy policy says that the minimum age is 13 years old.

Thank you so much!

I started programming at around 9 years old in MS Batch. By making TUI apps, I learned the fundamentals, like variables, logic, functions, etc.

The interest actually stemmed from gaming. I was playing Minecraft and I was like, "hey, why can't I make cool stuff like this?" Spoiler alert: I did not remake Minecraft lol. My father was an early adopter of tech, like when he purchased the first Macintosh, so he also encouraged me into the field.

I do have a job as a software engineer in the professional world. I do both professional work and amateur side project work. Did I miss something?

I've added a new redundant check that will ensure all chunks are uploaded before marking the large upload as finished. Hopefully this resolves the issue you were facing. If not, please do send me an email at the address listed at https://horizon.pics/help.

As for those files that failed but still show up in the dashboard, it means they're stored incomplete, and as such, will be automatically purged in 24 hours. I will work on hiding them in the dashboard.

Transcoding client-side still has considerations:

- What if the user's hardware is not performant?

- Transcoding is intensive, so their machine will become slow

- Even wasm based ffmpeg will not be as efficient and has its own issues

- Takes a very long time

Good catch. Forgot about this terms of service clause.

If you didn't notice, the logo has a mountain inside the first "o". "Everest", as in "Mount Everest", follows the theme of mountain metaphors. Mount Everest is also a high point, which symbolizes the fact that the plan gives you higher powers/limits.

Yes! Supported file types can, such as MP4. Other video formats are not currently supported for streaming (can still be uploaded for download) due to browser restrictions and compute considerations.

For supported video types, Horizon is optimized in the sense that it recognizes videos and allows viewers to stream it in chunks for seamless watching.

Got it. Thanks for your feedback. All servers and user content are hosted in the EU, so for some parts of the world, it may not perform as intended. I've also thought of creating replicas for latency reasons, but it does introduce extra costs.

For privacy reasons, it's kept out of Cloudflare's cache. But one could argue that it doesn't matter since traffic is flowing through Cloudflare anyways. What do you think?

Encryption at rest is disabled by default because many users do not want to keep track of all of their encryption keys, which are not stored by Horizon when that setting is enabled.

There are also other security features, like end-to-end encryption for pastes, but like mentioned before, not everyone wants to lose the ability to preview their content in the dashboard.

By giving the user a choice, I can cater to both crowds: one that prefers convenience, vs the other which prefers the most security.

Edit: To clarify, all files are already encrypted at rest with a key I control. But with Encryption enabled (capital E to distinguish the feature name), it is encrypted again with a key Horizon won't store.

For privacy reasons, there's no scanning. I rely on user reports to determine whether to take content down.

These are good questions to ask. Right now, the monetization strategy is profitable.

If an image does go viral, which has happened before on popular Reddit posts that hit the front page, the infrastructure should be able to handle it for a while, and it should not be costly.

Thanks for upgrading! And sorry that you ran into some speed bumps.

1. Good catch. Will improve on this.

2. I'm not sure what could be causing this. My account with thousands of uploads loads in less than one second.

3. Thumbnails are not supported due to compute and processing considerations, but will investigate this.

4. Good catch.

5. Compression can be compute intensive, but will investigate this further.

6. Will add that in.

7. Hopefully this isn't too ubiquitous? I'll investigate what's happening - but from preliminary analysis, it looks like a chunk may have failed along the way.

Haha. Didn't even realize that. The goal was mountain-themed metaphors. Hopefully the "Horizon" prefix is enough to differentiate.

Thanks! It's been operating for the past 3 years without any ads or third-party trackers, and I don't have plans to shut it down for the forseeable future.

Good call! The second one is Gyazo.

Thank you! It took quite a few iterations to get here. This time I tried to focus on reducing friction as much as possible, learning from other successful apps along the way.

I understand where you're coming from.

Most people do not have 100 GB of media on hand, nor will they probably in the next 5 years. As a result, it's basically unlimited from a reasonable usage standpoint. Before adding a 100 GB cap, I actually experimented with having "unlimited storage", but this can go wrong in many ways. I've spoken to companies in the VPN and cloud storage industries and having unlimited anything can go very wrong, especially if your service is promoted in a problematic context. e.g. unlimited cloud storage in a data hoarding community. By at least adding a cap, I can calculate a maximum cost for every user to influence my financial decisions and restrict abuse.

As for pay-per-use, no plans for now. Kagi's CEO had a really nice discussion about this on their forum and on HN. Simply put, for the demographic I'm targeting, which is quite broad, the typical user would likely get turned off by a pay-per-use model.

I've also priced Everest lower than other paid services, such as Vimeo and Gyazo, while including extra benefits.

Yes. Over the past 3 years I've been researching and re-iterating different monetization strategies. While I don't want to divulge exact operating costs, I can tell you that it's sustainable to provide free storage and the amount on the paid Everest plan.

Yes! While Horizon Alpine isn't ready for Windows yet, ShareX support is built in. Simply sign up, visit Settings, and download the configuration files under General > App Configuration. There are configurations for both files and links/pastes uploads.

These are already supported on the Everest plan! Please see the help article: https://horizon.pics/help/articles/can-i-use-my-own-domain.

Thank you so much! Your compliments and generosity are very much appreciated.

Yes, absolutely! You can use the built in uploader[0] on the web dashboard which works in parallel and supports large files.

[0]: https://horizon.pics/help/articles/start-uploading-files