Market research for imgs.sh

· team pico


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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