tl;dr: what about developers? When I started building Theneeds, we wanted users to be able to post, like in Twitter. And soon, we wanted users to be able to at

tl;dr: what about developers? When I started building Theneeds, we wanted users to be able to post, like in Twitter. And soon, we wanted users to be able to attach photos or other media. For media in the sense of an url that we then embed/display it's relatively easy. And even easier if you pay for an external service like embed.ly to do the job. For images it's a mess. We had to take care about uploading, resizing, posting async to s3, invalidating caches, and of course displaying. If I had to do that again, I'd surely look for an external service (that I didn't find at that time). Maybe this is a viable way to monetize? I guess that there are quite a good number of companies that need upload+display of UG images, or at least that they could do it if it was easier to plug in. Just for reference, embed.ly costs 20$/mo for just display, so I guess you could at least ask for that + storage costs. Next, you could add additional services such as cdn support, or anti spam/copyright infringement/adult content/etc.