[josephg]

I did some contracting work a few years ago, and one of our clients was a small entertainment news site. They used cloudinary for image hosting and were paying some insane amount for image hosting. I think their cloudinary bill was $8000/month or something. The client didn't even know that was expensive. They just saw it as a cost of doing business, alongside their cloudflare bill and so on. (And what they were paying us.)

It took work over several weeks to convince them that that was a ripoff. I think their business people eventually called up cloudinary and negotiated a better rate, but by that point I was annoyed by the whole situation. The site used cloudinary's HTTP based API from the browser. I configured cloudflare to redirect any request hitting example.com/images/... to act as a caching proxy to cloudinary's actual servers. Unsurprisingly, that one configuration change made their cloudinary bill drop to about 1/20th what it was. When the client was billed we got a panicked phone call asking why it was so low, and if something was broken on their site.

Anyway, tldr; lots of folks out there have no idea what a service like cloudinary should cost. Apparently more than enough to make cloudinary a profitable business.

[ProZsolt]

I think it's also a problem that engineers are rarely incentivized to make the right decision initially. If the initial price is low they will be prized if they able to cut down the development time. After that if the solution auto scales then it will be the beancounter's problem.

[qazxcvbnmlp]

I deliberately make things expensive during development so there’s room to ‘optimize’ later.

[earthboundkid]

I actually looked at Cloudinary for my job. I thought the pricing didn’t make sense so I ended up just running imgproxy on Heroku (it was free tier for a long time but I upped to hobbyist to get better latency).

[coding123]

Awesome story.