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Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur. You just need a free tier. No way out of that. I am not paying you even $0.01 if I need to upload 2 memes and s

Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur. You just need a free tier. No way out of that. I am not paying you even $0.01 if I need to upload 2 memes and share it with 5 people. I can afford it but not gonna happen. Here is ideas: make it a subscription. Allow free hosting with no registration but let the image expire (unhost) after N views and rate limit clients. Don't freaking ask me for my email. No, I do not care what your reason is kind sir. It is 2020 basically, don't ask me for my email. Just process the payment and give me a key I can use for futue uploads,ask me to optionally email but man i hate that so much. I don't see why I need any account other than an access token,but even if I do why do I need to give yet another imposing site my email? How about random 5 character subdomains for for payinf accounts and a premium fee for being able to choose the subdomain? All images uploaded with a token get the same subdomain? Look, I haven't looked too deep into what you do and your business model but with imgur I can still upload pictures for free,which I can link to directly and I quite like being able to share it and have others up/down vote it as a post. You don't do that. Imgur was specifically started because the founder, much like you was frustrated with all the b.s. image hosting options available when uploading to reddit. Right now only people who care about not being the product will pay to use this. Even though I am very much one of those people I can never use it since I am not a frequent image uploader. From what I have seen it replaces imgur as much as a dirt cheap shared webhost does. But I do applaud your api and acceptance of btc payments. And I subjectively am not impressed by your UI either. Just not attractive. Fyi: I made these comments tk try and provide honest critique that might be useful to OP.

bsagdiyev 7y ago
Pretty sure you're not his target customer then. I'm giving this a whirl with the free trial and will probably end up paying for it, it absolutely replaces imgur for me.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  And that is fine. But I could be. Just needs to go all in with the no b.s.
StavrosK 7y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, you have a choice. You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI, pay for IMGZ or pay and set up a VPS yourself. For me, the best option was #2, but it didn't exist, so I made it. And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer!
- badrabbit 7y ago
  I dislike a lot of things about imgur, you can't even save a gif on mobile. I would rather use an alternative. I might pay if the service meets my needs. But I have to use btc, which many don't realize can cost 4-5x more than what you charge. For example $10 for me means I have to get btc for $50 to avoid using creditcard(they charge many times more to use cash,etc.... Than using creditcard on an exchange which also asks for ID.)
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    You should buy $100 of BTC or so and keep it for stuff like this, I like paying with it. The experience is pretty good and you own your money.
    - badrabbit 7y ago
      I do that for other services but it does not change how I have to spend more,which is fine but more is more and I will spend only if it really solves my needs.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        You should use Bisq, it's slow but quite nice.
- weinzierl 7y ago
  > And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer. I don't know, I just tried it quickly on my mobile and everything was smooth. If you hire a designer be sure to get a good one so they don't ruin the simple use case experience.
pjc50 7y ago
If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that. There are children and people from non-western countries who have trouble accessing payment options, I'll give you that. > You just need a free tier. No way out of that No, you need a free tier. Doesn't mean that imgz needs a free tier. Especially if their target market is "people who are already fed up with one of the free hosts".
- badrabbit 7y ago
  > If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that. Now that makes little sense. Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments? You can create an account on the backend,plenty of sites already allow for guest check outs with no email asked so I don't get what you're on about. Email is a humongous ask for me. I will even pay double to avoid that. No, it is not useful for payment reminders,those are spammy to me. This is why you need to let people opt in! I don't want to give you any email addresses. You will decide some day how valuable your collection of emails and pictures is and you will sale it to the highesr bidder. Even if it is a paid service how can I know you won't get greedy. Also wake up please! Assume email does not exist unless you need to tell users something,and they give consent. You do not need email to host images. I do not wish to use a burner email for your lack of consideration for my consent. I do not wish to receive emails from an image host. If you need email for antifraud you're screwing it up already and I would rather just use AD supported free services because at least they are not tracking me by my email -- a very valuable datapoint for trackers. Once you have my email you can do micro-targeting very easily and basically figure out all there is to know about me. You do not need people's email unless they say they want you to email them. Heck, even if I want your reminders, email is the last way I want to use. Send me login/push notifications. I do not want to expose yet another site to account take over in the event my email is compromised. I seen people lose a lot of moneu because criminals phished their email. If I am paying you with btc, I do not wish to have any billing reminders or anything tracing the transaction to my email! Trust me,please! You do not need email unless you really and specifically with user consent (after a warning dialog) have a reason to use it. Please stop. Not one more decade of ignorance with respect to this subject. Oh and yeah, I need a free tier but so does OP. That's how you get users. The more you have free tier users, the more users convert to paying and the more sustainable the service becomes.
hinkley 7y ago
There's a strategy I only saw applied [twice, forgot another team was using this somewhere else] but I've been stumping for it every place else (I may almost have my current team convinced) If you segregate classes of service (consumer/producer/admin, or paying/non-paying), then you can over-allocate one class of service to guarantee responsiveness. The most obvious cost is that you need monitoring to make sure all classes of service are working, but you tend to have that anyway. With this structure, the HN hug of death still leaves your admin console running even while the public traffic is falilng over. Logged in users can still modify content. Or in the case of an image service, paying customers are undersubscribed and free tier is oversubscribed. In my situation, the customers are responsible for most of the CPU load on the system. We could throttle them while keeping their customer's requests highly responsive.
IshKebab 7y ago
> Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur. You just need a free tier. No way out of that. Having a free tier is what turned imgur into the mess that it is now. When it start it was a no-bullshit image host. But how do you host images for free?
- badrabbit 7y ago
  Not true. They were free only, free was not a tier. Paying customers support it.
rando444 7y ago
I like your ideas, but how do you retain control of your account? How do you prove that you are the owner? If someone manages to log in as you and takes over your account, how do you get it back without giving some method to contact you.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  Recovery token. It can optionally be emailed but you will be advised to write it down on paper -- this is already done with some 2FA auth. Let me flip tables:what if someone got access to your email and took over your image hosting account. How will you recover? Now they have access to private images and they can host illegal content and you will have to prove in court your account was taken over. I like pen and paper because you can lock it away somewhere safe. If your physical security is bad anyways, no recovery method can help you. Offline,simple and unhackable.

bsagdiyev 7y ago

Pretty sure you're not his target customer then. I'm giving this a whirl with the free trial and will probably end up paying for it, it absolutely replaces imgur for me.

badrabbit 7y ago
And that is fine. But I could be. Just needs to go all in with the no b.s.

StavrosK 7y ago

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, you have a choice. You can use Imgur, fighting off their user-hostile UI, pay for IMGZ or pay and set up a VPS yourself. For me, the best option was #2, but it didn't exist, so I made it. And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer!

badrabbit 7y ago
I dislike a lot of things about imgur, you can't even save a gif on mobile. I would rather use an alternative. I might pay if the service meets my needs. But I have to use btc, which many don't realize can cost 4-5x more than what you charge. For example $10 for me means I have to get btc for $50 to avoid using creditcard(they charge many times more to use cash,etc.... Than using creditcard on an exchange which also asks for ID.)
- StavrosK 7y ago
  You should buy $100 of BTC or so and keep it for stuff like this, I like paying with it. The experience is pretty good and you own your money.
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    I do that for other services but it does not change how I have to spend more,which is fine but more is more and I will spend only if it really solves my needs.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      You should use Bisq, it's slow but quite nice.
weinzierl 7y ago
> And yeah, the UI is trash. Buy the big plan so I can afford a designer. I don't know, I just tried it quickly on my mobile and everything was smooth. If you hire a designer be sure to get a good one so they don't ruin the simple use case experience.

pjc50 7y ago

If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that. There are children and people from non-western countries who have trouble accessing payment options, I'll give you that. > You just need a free tier. No way out of that No, you need a free tier. Doesn't mean that imgz needs a free tier. Especially if their target market is "people who are already fed up with one of the free hosts".

badrabbit 7y ago
> If you're paying for something, the concept of an "account" has to exist in order to record the payment against. If you're paying for something, that generally transfers a chunk of personal information for anti-fraud purposes. Given that, an email is not a huge ask, and is very useful for e.g. billing reminders. It doesn't have to be a spam thing and GDPR is gradually cracking down on that. Now that makes little sense. Why do I care about how a site keeps records of payments? You can create an account on the backend,plenty of sites already allow for guest check outs with no email asked so I don't get what you're on about. Email is a humongous ask for me. I will even pay double to avoid that. No, it is not useful for payment reminders,those are spammy to me. This is why you need to let people opt in! I don't want to give you any email addresses. You will decide some day how valuable your collection of emails and pictures is and you will sale it to the highesr bidder. Even if it is a paid service how can I know you won't get greedy. Also wake up please! Assume email does not exist unless you need to tell users something,and they give consent. You do not need email to host images. I do not wish to use a burner email for your lack of consideration for my consent. I do not wish to receive emails from an image host. If you need email for antifraud you're screwing it up already and I would rather just use AD supported free services because at least they are not tracking me by my email -- a very valuable datapoint for trackers. Once you have my email you can do micro-targeting very easily and basically figure out all there is to know about me. You do not need people's email unless they say they want you to email them. Heck, even if I want your reminders, email is the last way I want to use. Send me login/push notifications. I do not want to expose yet another site to account take over in the event my email is compromised. I seen people lose a lot of moneu because criminals phished their email. If I am paying you with btc, I do not wish to have any billing reminders or anything tracing the transaction to my email! Trust me,please! You do not need email unless you really and specifically with user consent (after a warning dialog) have a reason to use it. Please stop. Not one more decade of ignorance with respect to this subject. Oh and yeah, I need a free tier but so does OP. That's how you get users. The more you have free tier users, the more users convert to paying and the more sustainable the service becomes.

hinkley 7y ago

There's a strategy I only saw applied [twice, forgot another team was using this somewhere else] but I've been stumping for it every place else (I may almost have my current team convinced) If you segregate classes of service (consumer/producer/admin, or paying/non-paying), then you can over-allocate one class of service to guarantee responsiveness. The most obvious cost is that you need monitoring to make sure all classes of service are working, but you tend to have that anyway. With this structure, the HN hug of death still leaves your admin console running even while the public traffic is falilng over. Logged in users can still modify content. Or in the case of an image service, paying customers are undersubscribed and free tier is oversubscribed. In my situation, the customers are responsible for most of the CPU load on the system. We could throttle them while keeping their customer's requests highly responsive.

IshKebab 7y ago

> Glad this exists. Still does not replace imgur. You just need a free tier. No way out of that. Having a free tier is what turned imgur into the mess that it is now. When it start it was a no-bullshit image host. But how do you host images for free?

badrabbit 7y ago
Not true. They were free only, free was not a tier. Paying customers support it.

rando444 7y ago

I like your ideas, but how do you retain control of your account? How do you prove that you are the owner? If someone manages to log in as you and takes over your account, how do you get it back without giving some method to contact you.

badrabbit 7y ago
Recovery token. It can optionally be emailed but you will be advised to write it down on paper -- this is already done with some 2FA auth. Let me flip tables:what if someone got access to your email and took over your image hosting account. How will you recover? Now they have access to private images and they can host illegal content and you will have to prove in court your account was taken over. I like pen and paper because you can lock it away somewhere safe. If your physical security is bad anyways, no recovery method can help you. Offline,simple and unhackable.