Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

The marketing says that this is an Alternative to Imgur, but the product doesn't feel like an alternative to Imgur, it feels like an alternative to OneDrive. It shares more features with Gyazo, the other product you compare it to, but I don't see it being a solid upsell.

Is marketed to Imgur users as a better alternative for broadly sharing memes on the Internet, and if so why is privacy and encryption important? Couldn't privacy be a limiting factor, since Imgur is first and foremost a social network? Wouldn't the limited space of the free plan be a dealbreaker for someone happily using Imgur in an unlimited capacity for free?

Is it marketed to business users that actually prioritize privacy, and if so, aren't you worried that comparing it to a Social Network like Imgur would betray the privacy angle? Where are the enterprise options that allow me to onboard people with SSO/MFA and protect sensitive files from people outside of the organization? There are too many security holes in this product to trust it for business use, especially copying the full URL to every shared object to the clipboard where it can be accessed with anyone with the URL...

If someone actually wanted to use this service to store and share large files, you only offer 100GB for $5/month, and limit file sizes to 10GB. For $2/month you can get 100GB on Google Drive with roughly the same capabilities, and for $10 you can get 2TB on Google Drive or MEGA, with the latter being encrypted by default. $10 from Office 365 gets you 6TB of cloud storage with sharing capabilities. The pricing for Horizon storage is outrageous by comparison to every competitor's offerings.

Furthermore, you have to read through the pricing page to discover that encryption at-rest isn't default, and you have to turn it on for files you want encrypted, and it doesn't even tell you what kind of encryption or how the recipient decrypts it. Alternatives like MEGA still have you beat in that regard.

So it's an S3 bucket with a CDN, and a file upload client...

Charge for storage and bandwidth. Providers like AWS S3 are doing fine with that model.

E: not bandwidth, data transfer

You're comparing Horizon to cloud storage services, which I think is unfair. Horizon is focused on the sharing aspect. Uploading to Google Drive and OneDrive is not as effortless as Horizon and won't provide the same frictionless viewing experience for whoever you share the links to.

Horizon is actually cheaper than alternatives, including Gyazo and Streamable, as said in another person's comment.

Global encryption is enabled at rest for every file, but with a key that I control. Toggling the Encryption feature (capital E to distinguish the feature name), encrypts the file again with a key not stored by Horizon. This info can be found in the help center.

Wow. So you already provide a ShareX Custom Uploader configuration file on your website. I wasn't expecting that. I expected it so little that I didn't even bother searching.

So it works basically the same as mine but instead of the shitty cookie workaround I did, you have a header called "Authorization": "Bearer xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx" that won't blow up in my face every few weeks

Very nice