Market research for imgs.sh

on team pico's blog

#research

I've been a little more vocal recently about our intention to build a premium image hosting service. We are still in the planning stage of that endeavor but I wanted to spend some time to perform market research on image hosting services currently available to people.

I've gathered a list of image hosting services and will be using this list as the foundation for our investigation.

Feature comparison

Comparing cheapest option for all paid services. There's an entire class of general purpose object storage services (S3, R2, etc.) that I do want to investigate but their pricing model (pay for use) are different from most of these so I'm going to ignore them for now. However I do want to acknowldege that they can be used for image hosting.

service price file size total storage size num file types ads compressed resized bundled permanent api hotlinks
photos.google.com $1.67/mo (1 yr plan) 200MB 100GB 9 no no no yes yes yes yes
dropbox.com $10/mo (1 yr plan) 100GB 2TB All no no no yes yes yes yes
imgur.com $5/mo 20MB/200MB* Unlimited 14 no yes no yes yes yes no
snap.as $6/mo 50MB Unlimited ?? no no yes yes yes yes yes
lensdump.com $2/mo 100MB Unlimited 5 no no no no yes yes no
postimages.org $3.49/mo (3 yr plan) 48MB Unlimited ?? no no no no yes no yes
flickr.com $5.99/mo (1 yr plan) 200MB Unlimited 4 no no no no yes yes yes
photobucket.com $5.41/mo (1 yr plan) ?? 25GB 4 no no no no yes no yes
imageshack.com $3.16/mo (1 yr plan) 25MB Unlimited 5 no no no no yes no yes
catbox.moe Free 200MB Unlimited All - 5 no no no no yes yes no

Summary

Out of all of these services and considering their overall aethetic, price, features, and ease of use, there's a couple that I like.

snap.as

I really like the aesthetic. This is very close to what we are probably going to implement. A very minimalist web site that shows the essentials that also nicely integrates with their other services.

catbox.moe

As far as I can tell this service is being run by a single person, on their own hardware, in a colo. Their monthly bill is reaching $1k/mo and a good portion of it they are funding themselves. I'm definitely impressed by this service.

Pricing

Premium Features


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