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by _bro5 3257 days ago
The prices are excellent if you have a small number of images read/processed many times over a month. If you have a large number of images touched only a few times a month, it's horrendously expensive.

For example I can thumbnail ~7M images in ~2 days on my dedicated machine (40/s) which costs me $60/mo to colocate. $60/mo gets me a paltry 20k images from Imgix (though admittedly I can process them multiple times for the same price, I don't need to).
2 comments
andrewingram 3257 days ago
Right. In my last two jobs, one of them had a relatively low volume of images (let's say, around 30k being requested per month) scaled to an arbitrary number of transformations, whilst the other had a high volume of images (millions) with a low number of transformations.

In both cases, the cost of doing it ourselves (using something like thumbor) would have been a few thousand per month. In the former example, imgix cost a few hundred, in the latter it would have cost in the hundreds of thousands.

imgix is the fastest of the services i've looked at (transformation time is roughly half what I got from cloudinary, and average response time is also about half), but its pricing model means it's completely unaffordable for certain types of product.

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_Codemonkeyism 3257 days ago
Out of curiosity, what CDN does deliver 7M for $60/mo with sourcing from your colocated server?

For me Imgix is primarily a cheap CDN with the benefit of unlimited sizes of each image depending on the device.

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tdviking21 3254 days ago
Disclosure, I am from imgix. If you start to exceed $500/month we can offer discounts and certainly when you are looking at millions of images then a flat rate at a lower level makes a lot more sense. 30 million unique images certainly should not be $90,000, that would be outrageous.
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Veratyr 3257 days ago
The $60 above doesn't include bandwidth from either my transit provider or Imgix, you can purchase a CDN separately.

Imgix is 8c/GB which is certainly competitive but by no means unique. CloudFront is only $0.005 more expensive on the higest tier and gets as low as $0.02 on the lowsest. A cheaper CDN like CDN77 starts at $0.049/GB and goes as low as $0.007/GB.

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boundlessdreamz 3257 days ago
Cloudfront charges for requests and it can often be the biggest component of your bill.

CDN77 performance in terms of latency is not that great. If you are looking for a cheap CDN with good performance, buy edgecast from a reseller. The only problem with edgecast is that they charge a really high fee for SSL support for custom domains

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