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by jhgg 425 days ago
$5 to resize 1,000 images is ridiculously expensive.

At my last job we resized a very large amount of images every day, and did so for significantly cheaper (a fraction of a cent for a thousand images).

Am I missing something here?

5 comments

It's the usual PaaS convenience tax, you end up paying an order of magnitude or so premium for the underlying bandwidth and compute. AIUI Vercel runs on AWS so in their case it's a compound platform tax, AWS is expensive even before Vercel adds their own margin on top.
I would call it ignorance tax, paas can be fine if you know what you are doing.
(I work at Vercel) We moved to a transformation-based price: https://x.com/TheBuildLog/status/1892308957865111918
Sweet! That's much more reasonable!
You're not missing anything. A generation of programmers has been raised to believe platforms like Vercel / Next.js are not only normal, but ideal.
Absolutely insane pricing, maybe for small blogs, but didn’t they calculate this trough?

Millions of episode, of course they will be visited and the optimization is run.

Hi, I'm the author of the blog (though I didn't post it on HN).

The site was originally secondary to our business and was built by a contractor. It was secondary to our business and we didn't pay much attention until we actually added the episode pages and the bots discovered them.

I saw a lot of disparaging comments here. It's definitely our fault for not understanding the implications of what the code was doing. We didn't mention the contractor in the post, because we didn't want to throw them under the bus. The accountability is all ours.

Yeah, curious too.

Can't the `convert` CLI tool resize images? Can that not be used here instead?

Whoa there Boomer, that doesn't sound like it uses enough npm packages! It also doesn't sound very web scale. /s