[codegeek]

Not your fault. Developers tend to sometimes underestimate the power of releasing a command line utility as a web based/API tool that can help non techies do simple stuff. Image resizing is a recurring candidate but there are others like conversion tools (to pdf), checkers/monitors (ssl for example) etc. Yes, you could do these on your server with a simple cmd line but tons of folks are willing to pay to be able to use a browser/API to do the same.

[bcjordan]

It feels like a compelling property here is to have a "single point of continuously increasing quality"—that is, one changing chunk of code that is continuously improved and battle tested as more and more users report issues that require workarounds.

(But of course ever-changing externally hosted web services like these have their drawbacks.)