3 ms·

The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images —they're all pretty average for a small image

The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images —they're all pretty average for a small image host— but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering some quite simple problems. Seriously, I know I'm not in their shoes but I know what they do, I know popular options in these areas and I know they are literally throwing cash away by not trying to in-house any of this. The worst thing is they seem proud about their decisions; that their current situation has justified $100K/month expenses. I'm not the only person in here that thinks they could be delivering the same —even better— service on a fraction of their current budget, even after hiring. I think they should be ashamed.

MobileVet 8y ago
I hear you, but everything is a trade off. You and I would optimize the expenses more diligently, but they have chosen to focus 110% on the product. Could they do both, yes. Do they want to, no. The goal, imho, of a startup is doing what you love on your own terms. They clearly love the product and have optimized accordingly.
speedplane 8y ago
> The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images ... but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering ... What I found interesting, is that just a sliver of the budget is spent on software rather than hardware. I don't think this is uncommon, few teams are willing to pay for software they can get for free or make themselves. It's a bit surprising (but explainable), that commodity hardware that everyone has access to dominates the budget.
sudhirj 8y ago
Doing a cost benefit analysis and deciding that using a service instead of hiring and paying humans is a perfectly rational decision. I’ve downvoted because I see a lot of vitriol like this and it’s exhausting to argue each time that these decisions are carefully considered and work well for the people making them. This is no different from saying people should be ashamed because they pay so much for food, then it’s much cheaper (almost free!) to grow it yourself in a pot.
- oliwarner 8y ago
  Being able to come to the decision that in-housing isn't good value, is of course possible. But they do it for everything. And they've been exhaustive enough in their breakdown here that it's trivial to any experience developer that they're spaffing money away. They're not in an all-or-nothing situation. There are so many individual elements that they could improve efficiency on and they're just not. And I think cooking your own food vs going to a restaurant is a better analogy (because it focuses on a service provision, not resource gathering). They're currently eating out, seven days a week.
  - sudhirj 8y ago
    Even if they are currently eating out, seven days a week, that was a decision to focus entirely on the product without any distractions. https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small-team-fbdd55571906 https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small-te... It's absolutely nothing for them to be ashamed of. We can all disagree with the decision and say that we wouldn't do the same, but we shouldn't call it a bad of shameful decision.
    - oliwarner 8y ago
      I don't understand your stance in the context of HN. We're here to make money, celebrate people who can make money from the things they build, the services they provide... And most importantly to learn from it when it goes right and learn from the mistakes when it doesn't. Unsplash is eating out seven days a week. But they don't have anything to show for it. They're burning through cash. The product is basic. There's no magic, nothing clever. It just is. They're saying everything is great! I think it's a shambles; simultaneously mediocre at both making money and being an excellent example of engineering. Why is anybody here celebrating or defending this result? I maintain what I said. Unsplash should be ashamed. They shouldn't trot out numbers like this label them a success. It's a record of successive failures.
  - tschellenbach 7y ago
    Actually they stopped using Keen since it didn't work out well for them. They do build some stuff in-house, just prefer not to.
Theodores 8y ago
The curious thing is that they don't pay the photographers. So that kills the stock photo business model for everyone else. You can't take nice pictures and expect that some day someone will pay you for the un-watermarked versions now UnSplash has taken that market away. So money is now going to these CDN hosts and other software suppliers, spent like water with a business plan that is not in the article. I guess the likes of Adobe can bung them a few million a year as the service is worth that to them. Same with Squarespace, they can partner and pay a few million to keep unSplash's lights on. So this has some interesting negative effects from local communities where people once had their own websites and their own local photography businesses. Although unSplash might not directly be reaming out every small town in the world making it impossible for anyone to make a living from stock photography, Squarespace kind of are. Web pages have made themselves complicated today, once you needed Notepad and an FTP program, nowadays you need a team of developers to spend months in order to put 'hello world' online. So people are nowadays going with Squarespace and other highly marketed services, that, in turn, rely on UnSplash. The images initially look very impressive with UnSplash but I was once really impressed by a Pret A Manger cafe. Then I realised there were many Pret A Manger cafes in many towns and they all were the same inside. Quality stuff but identikit. At the same time, each outlet was not exactly identical, there could be a different amount of chairs, the counters could be laid out differently. (Readers outside the UK could swap Starbucks for Pret a Manger). I see UnSplash as a photo version of a Pret a Manger cafe. After a while the images are all very much the same. This is good and it is bad. It is bad in that so much of the internet becomes predictable and generic. It is good in that it becomes quite easy to do better. Much like how you can do better than Pret a Manger at making a sandwich, just by making your own, so it is with UnSplash, you can get far better photos for your project by taking your own photos and doing your own editing. I would not bet against the success of UnSplash any more than I would bet against the success of Pret A Manger. However, I will be making my own bread or visiting independent cafes, oh, and taking my own photos rather than using 'free' formulaic stock photos. Enough of the analogies, a critique of UnSplash and what they are not doing. If you look at a Squarespace site that has some UnSplash banner then the image will be several thousand pixels by several thousand pixels. This is good but bad. Good in that native phone camera resolution images are nice to see, bad for bandwidth. This bandwidth is mitigated by CDNs. The CDNs do the different resolutions but it is quite dated tech being used to do this. I think that for most website owners, e.g. one's small business, there is a performance benefit in using one's own hosting and running Google Pagespeed to optimise and serve the images. This can work with the low bandwidth browser flag and do responsive source sets. This means putting the original image dimensions in the HTML for Pagespeed to write out the srcset images, putting in a picture element and so forth. The images also get sent as webp when needed. Now if I did want to show some thousand pixel images then I would want to do that with OpenSeadragon. This takes the deep zoom aspect to a whole new level. It works fine for a small website without a complex CDN. Now there is no reason why I could not 'steal' a few UnSplash images and serve them my own special way with Google Pagespeed doing all the work on my own server but I am not going to be running generic stock photos anyway. Google's Pagespeed falls in between the gaps between large compartmentised teams so nobody is using it. Why would you when for the same reasons as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody gets fired for spending a fortune on a CDN? However, if Squarespace and other UnSplash clients decide they can actually offer a better, faster product due to improved tech for serving images then they can start doing their own stock photography.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tschellenbach 8y ago
They are a VC backed high growth startup. Their focus should be on whatever they've decided is the success metric for their startup. Many in-house projects end up costing 10x the cost of an external vendor. Of course, that's not something you read about often on HNews, its super common though.

MobileVet 8y ago

I hear you, but everything is a trade off. You and I would optimize the expenses more diligently, but they have chosen to focus 110% on the product. Could they do both, yes. Do they want to, no. The goal, imho, of a startup is doing what you love on your own terms. They clearly love the product and have optimized accordingly.

speedplane 8y ago

> The numbers being thrown around on this post are staggering. Not the bandwidth, storage or or the number of images ... but the casual tone that they're willing to throw money at services rather than engineering ... What I found interesting, is that just a sliver of the budget is spent on software rather than hardware. I don't think this is uncommon, few teams are willing to pay for software they can get for free or make themselves. It's a bit surprising (but explainable), that commodity hardware that everyone has access to dominates the budget.

sudhirj 8y ago

Doing a cost benefit analysis and deciding that using a service instead of hiring and paying humans is a perfectly rational decision. I’ve downvoted because I see a lot of vitriol like this and it’s exhausting to argue each time that these decisions are carefully considered and work well for the people making them. This is no different from saying people should be ashamed because they pay so much for food, then it’s much cheaper (almost free!) to grow it yourself in a pot.

oliwarner 8y ago
Being able to come to the decision that in-housing isn't good value, is of course possible. But they do it for everything. And they've been exhaustive enough in their breakdown here that it's trivial to any experience developer that they're spaffing money away. They're not in an all-or-nothing situation. There are so many individual elements that they could improve efficiency on and they're just not. And I think cooking your own food vs going to a restaurant is a better analogy (because it focuses on a service provision, not resource gathering). They're currently eating out, seven days a week.
- sudhirj 8y ago
  Even if they are currently eating out, seven days a week, that was a decision to focus entirely on the product without any distractions. https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small-team-fbdd55571906 https://medium.com/unsplash/scaling-unsplash-with-a-small-te... It's absolutely nothing for them to be ashamed of. We can all disagree with the decision and say that we wouldn't do the same, but we shouldn't call it a bad of shameful decision.
  - oliwarner 8y ago
    I don't understand your stance in the context of HN. We're here to make money, celebrate people who can make money from the things they build, the services they provide... And most importantly to learn from it when it goes right and learn from the mistakes when it doesn't. Unsplash is eating out seven days a week. But they don't have anything to show for it. They're burning through cash. The product is basic. There's no magic, nothing clever. It just is. They're saying everything is great! I think it's a shambles; simultaneously mediocre at both making money and being an excellent example of engineering. Why is anybody here celebrating or defending this result? I maintain what I said. Unsplash should be ashamed. They shouldn't trot out numbers like this label them a success. It's a record of successive failures.
- tschellenbach 7y ago
  Actually they stopped using Keen since it didn't work out well for them. They do build some stuff in-house, just prefer not to.

Theodores 8y ago

The curious thing is that they don't pay the photographers. So that kills the stock photo business model for everyone else. You can't take nice pictures and expect that some day someone will pay you for the un-watermarked versions now UnSplash has taken that market away. So money is now going to these CDN hosts and other software suppliers, spent like water with a business plan that is not in the article. I guess the likes of Adobe can bung them a few million a year as the service is worth that to them. Same with Squarespace, they can partner and pay a few million to keep unSplash's lights on. So this has some interesting negative effects from local communities where people once had their own websites and their own local photography businesses. Although unSplash might not directly be reaming out every small town in the world making it impossible for anyone to make a living from stock photography, Squarespace kind of are. Web pages have made themselves complicated today, once you needed Notepad and an FTP program, nowadays you need a team of developers to spend months in order to put 'hello world' online. So people are nowadays going with Squarespace and other highly marketed services, that, in turn, rely on UnSplash. The images initially look very impressive with UnSplash but I was once really impressed by a Pret A Manger cafe. Then I realised there were many Pret A Manger cafes in many towns and they all were the same inside. Quality stuff but identikit. At the same time, each outlet was not exactly identical, there could be a different amount of chairs, the counters could be laid out differently. (Readers outside the UK could swap Starbucks for Pret a Manger). I see UnSplash as a photo version of a Pret a Manger cafe. After a while the images are all very much the same. This is good and it is bad. It is bad in that so much of the internet becomes predictable and generic. It is good in that it becomes quite easy to do better. Much like how you can do better than Pret a Manger at making a sandwich, just by making your own, so it is with UnSplash, you can get far better photos for your project by taking your own photos and doing your own editing. I would not bet against the success of UnSplash any more than I would bet against the success of Pret A Manger. However, I will be making my own bread or visiting independent cafes, oh, and taking my own photos rather than using 'free' formulaic stock photos. Enough of the analogies, a critique of UnSplash and what they are not doing. If you look at a Squarespace site that has some UnSplash banner then the image will be several thousand pixels by several thousand pixels. This is good but bad. Good in that native phone camera resolution images are nice to see, bad for bandwidth. This bandwidth is mitigated by CDNs. The CDNs do the different resolutions but it is quite dated tech being used to do this. I think that for most website owners, e.g. one's small business, there is a performance benefit in using one's own hosting and running Google Pagespeed to optimise and serve the images. This can work with the low bandwidth browser flag and do responsive source sets. This means putting the original image dimensions in the HTML for Pagespeed to write out the srcset images, putting in a picture element and so forth. The images also get sent as webp when needed. Now if I did want to show some thousand pixel images then I would want to do that with OpenSeadragon. This takes the deep zoom aspect to a whole new level. It works fine for a small website without a complex CDN. Now there is no reason why I could not 'steal' a few UnSplash images and serve them my own special way with Google Pagespeed doing all the work on my own server but I am not going to be running generic stock photos anyway. Google's Pagespeed falls in between the gaps between large compartmentised teams so nobody is using it. Why would you when for the same reasons as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody gets fired for spending a fortune on a CDN? However, if Squarespace and other UnSplash clients decide they can actually offer a better, faster product due to improved tech for serving images then they can start doing their own stock photography.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tschellenbach 8y ago

They are a VC backed high growth startup. Their focus should be on whatever they've decided is the success metric for their startup. Many in-house projects end up costing 10x the cost of an external vendor. Of course, that's not something you read about often on HNews, its super common though.