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Loved reading about their journey on HN. Here's a 5-year-old thread about their costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 https://news.ycombinator.c

by danso 6y ago

Loved reading about their journey on HN. Here's a 5-year-old thread about their costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085 Unfortunately the original link is down (and I could not find an archived version). But here's relevant material from the comments: > $18k is a lot of money to spend each month. Understanding the scale of Unsplash though can help explain the costs. > So at a cost of $18k per month you are getting 30M pages served, 140M API calls, 2.2M background jobs and 143TB of bandwidth. That sounds like a lot of bang for your buck. > The biggest chunk is the bandwidth charges from imgix. They do appear to be giving you a break on their published pricing, but not a huge one ($0.075/GB vs $0.08/GB). The CDN they are using appears to be Fastly, which also has a published price of $0.08/GB. So, there doesn't appear to be any overzealous markup on imgix's part.

llacb47 6y ago
https://archive.fo/iZyRK https://archive.fo/iZyRK
exikyut 6y ago
Nice news: the link in that HN article goes to backstage.crew.co, which was 302ing to dribbble.com. And while IA didn't save a copy of the dribbble page... ...it did save copies of the original links before they started 302ing. In fact, it saved across two different site reorganizations, https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.crew.co/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.... (backstage.crew.co) https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/b... (crew.co/backstage) Both pages are fully intact; I think the theme on the 2nd one is a bit nicer. (This feels like a bit of a "1st-world-problems" discussion, making commentary about the most aesthetically pleasing presentation of obscurely archived webpages that've officially fallen off the internet.)
Aeolun 6y ago
I don’t mean to rain on their parade, but 30M requests served per month, while sounding really good, translates to 11 requests per second. And maybe 60 requests per second for their 140M API requests. If I were paying $2500 per month for that I’d be a bit sad.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vbernat 6y ago
  They say it's mostly bandwidth cost. But 143TB/month is around 500Mbps. If they were to buy it themselves, at the time, it would have been around 500$/month at most. Of course, if you use a CDN/cloud, you pay the extra costs around such a service.
- busymom0 6y ago
  This was around April 18, 2016, when Unsplash was relatively new (Founded in 2013?). I think those numbers were pretty good for that time.
busymom0 6y ago
I am curious about why they went with Fastly? Doesn't Cloudflare free tier provide caching of images? Worst case scenario, they could use their $20 or $200 tiers if needed? https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-Understanding-Cloudflare-s-CDN https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-U...
joking 6y ago
the imgix service is probably worth it in some scales, but for something like unsplash I doubt that is the cheaper option.

by danso 6y ago

llacb47 6y ago

https://archive.fo/iZyRK https://archive.fo/iZyRK

exikyut 6y ago

Nice news: the link in that HN article goes to backstage.crew.co, which was 302ing to dribbble.com. And while IA didn't save a copy of the dribbble page... ...it did save copies of the original links before they started 302ing. In fact, it saved across two different site reorganizations, https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.crew.co/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160504110408/http://backstage.... (backstage.crew.co) https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash-cost/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160903203745/https://crew.co/b... (crew.co/backstage) Both pages are fully intact; I think the theme on the 2nd one is a bit nicer. (This feels like a bit of a "1st-world-problems" discussion, making commentary about the most aesthetically pleasing presentation of obscurely archived webpages that've officially fallen off the internet.)

Aeolun 6y ago

I don’t mean to rain on their parade, but 30M requests served per month, while sounding really good, translates to 11 requests per second. And maybe 60 requests per second for their 140M API requests. If I were paying $2500 per month for that I’d be a bit sad.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vbernat 6y ago
They say it's mostly bandwidth cost. But 143TB/month is around 500Mbps. If they were to buy it themselves, at the time, it would have been around 500$/month at most. Of course, if you use a CDN/cloud, you pay the extra costs around such a service.
busymom0 6y ago
This was around April 18, 2016, when Unsplash was relatively new (Founded in 2013?). I think those numbers were pretty good for that time.

busymom0 6y ago

I am curious about why they went with Fastly? Doesn't Cloudflare free tier provide caching of images? Worst case scenario, they could use their $20 or $200 tiers if needed? https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-Understanding-Cloudflare-s-CDN https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-U...

joking 6y ago

the imgix service is probably worth it in some scales, but for something like unsplash I doubt that is the cheaper option.