Cost of serving billions of images per month • Hacker News Board

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#11

Post by amanzi » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

So they must have some form of business model, right? All I can see on their website is that everything is for free, even their API which can be used for free without any limits or restrictions. And given the already huge Imgix costs, abusing or over-using their API to request and resize images would directly increase their overall costs. According to Crunchbase (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unsplash#section-fun...) they raised $10m last year, but they must be churning through $3m+ per year on staffing and hosting costs.

I use and love the service but I can't see how it can last for more than a few more years.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#12

Post by busymom0 » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

Is there any particular reason they are still using Heroku instead of something like DO or AWS+S3? They can probably save a lot of money that way. Unless Heroku is offering them some good deal?

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#13

Post by busymom0 » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

amanzi wrote: post #11

So they must have some form of business model, right? All I can see on their website is that everything is for free, even their API which can be used for free without any limits or restrictions. And given the already huge Imgix costs, abusing or over-using their API to request and resize images would directly increase their overall costs. According to Crunchbase ( https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unsplash#sect…

This reminds me of Soundcloud a few years ago when they were giving away API access for free for unlimited plays but then were almost close to bankrupt and pretty much shut down all API plays. I ended up shutting down my 3rd party app then but not sure what's their API limits now. Twitter recently made huge changes to their API limits too which impacted a lot of 3rd party apps.

I hope Unsplash doesn't end up similar to those.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#14

Post by manigandham » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #10

no1youknowz wrote: post #2

I like Unsplash. They and Pixabay are what I use for apps I have developed in the past. But simply, this floors me. I looked at their costs and with some developer muscle, you could find savings such as: - Move Fastly to Cloudflare. They don't expressly say what the cost is for that. But moving to CF would eliminate it. - Move Heroku to Digital Ocean. It's not difficult to create a fully redundant solution. - Move fr…

$50k/month comes out to $600k/year which is the cost around 2-3 engineers counting overhead. To manage infrastructure at that scale themselves they'd need someone who knows DevOps. To write services at that scale they'd need someone who knows backend engineering and micro services. Then they'd need to be able to have 24/7 on call rotations for when things break. And of course, like any rewrite it seems like a "couple…

And some projects really are just simple. Scale makes no difference to their services, it's a basic OLTP + search with resizing image proxy.

This doesn't have any SLAs nor is it critical software either. 24/7 oncall is completely unnecessary.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#15

Post by dna_polymerase » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

> We continue to use Heroku as our main web platform. Despite its premium cost over AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Heroku’s built-in deployment and configuration tools allow our team to move faster, more confidently, and more reliably.

This is just bullshit, really. I'd buy this excuse from a service like Snapchat/Facebook in their early years, but unsplash is nothing that changes dramatically all the time.

Every single point in their analysis just shows how they like to waste money. Imgix as the main image CDN? Start serving images using thumbor and a cheap CDN like BunnyCDN or KeyCDN.

They could easily save 60% on their monthly bill. That would enable them to hire 1 or 2 engineers capable of maintaining a few dozen servers on AWS, DO or GCP.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#16

Post by Jackim » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #9

What's the business model here? We would never run with such expensive options for this functionality, especially if it was a free/donations powered service. This company raised $7.5M though: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...

As far as I can tell they're selling data. Their API requires hotlinking so they can track everything. They know exactly how often each picture is viewed and downloaded. Unsplash knows which images are successful and which ones are duds. I'm not sure who they're selling to, but I'm sure lots of folks would be interested.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#17

Post by ron22 » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:25 PM UTC

busymom0 wrote: post #12

Is there any particular reason they are still using Heroku instead of something like DO or AWS+S3? They can probably save a lot of money that way. Unless Heroku is offering them some good deal?

They tell you in the blog post.

"We continue to use Heroku as our main web platform. Despite its premium cost over AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Heroku’s built-in deployment and configuration tools allow our team to move faster, more confidently, and more reliably.

As we’ve detailed previously, the alternatives would undoubtably be cheaper on paper. But in reality, the increased simplicity and freedom offered by Heroku for a small, product-focused team is a major cost savings advantage."

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#18

Post by tpetry » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:34 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #14

marcinzm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50k/month comes out to $600k/year which is the cost around 2-3 engineers counting overhead. To manage infrastructure at that scale themselves they'd need someone who knows DevOps. To write services at that scale they'd need someone who knows backend engineering and micro services. Then they'd need to be able to have 24/7 on call rotations for when things break. And of course, like any rewrite it seems like a "couple…

And some projects really are just simple. Scale makes no difference to their services, it's a basic OLTP + search with resizing image proxy. This doesn't have any SLAs nor is it critical software either. 24/7 oncall is completely unnecessary.

Don‘t underestimate the massive cpu power needed for scaling images at their request rate

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#19

Post by forrestthewoods » Sat, May 04, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

dna_polymerase wrote: post #15

> We continue to use Heroku as our main web platform. Despite its premium cost over AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Heroku’s built-in deployment and configuration tools allow our team to move faster, more confidently, and more reliably. This is just bullshit, really. I'd buy this excuse from a service like Snapchat/Facebook in their early years, but unsplash is nothing that changes dramatically all the time. Every sing…

> They could easily save 60% on their monthly bill. That would enable them to hire 1 or 2 engineers capable of maintaining a few dozen servers on AWS, DO or GCP.

If they reduce their bill and then hire engineers to do the same job they've gained nothing other than an increased headcount for no discernible benefit.

Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month

#20

Post by mharroun » Sun, May 05, 2019, 12:20 AM UTC

I'm surprised that at that scale you are still not building some core functions internally.

Though it makes sense, buy over build is almost always the best choice early stage. It's hard to slow down product velocity to fix things that work fine when costs start to add up. (Also it's easy to say "do you want to save 3k a month or deliver features x,y, and z" and let costs slide)