I like Unsplash. They and Pixabay are what I use for apps I have developed in the past.
But simply, this floors me. I looked at their costs and with some developer muscle, you could find savings such as:
- Move Fastly to Cloudflare. They don't expressly say what the cost is for that. But moving to CF would eliminate it.
- Move Heroku to Digital Ocean. It's not difficult to create a fully redundant solution.
- Move from Imgix to having Golang micro services which handle the resizing of images and use something like Belugacdn for the CDN. Beluga is $5k a month for a PB. (Or some other cheaper CDN if you don't like Beluga, but damn... imgix pricing)
I'm pretty sure that a savvy CTO could save at least $50k a month with a well designed project that does this over many months and achieves the same result and keeps the redundancy concerns for the small team.
I do realise however, why the team have done this. In the same position (with very few resources) I would probably have done the same. But damn, when a cost of a service gets up to a years salary ($120k) for a good developer. Time to seek alternatives.
But simply, this floors me. I looked at their costs and with some developer muscle, you could find savings such as:
- Move Fastly to Cloudflare. They don't expressly say what the cost is for that. But moving to CF would eliminate it.
- Move Heroku to Digital Ocean. It's not difficult to create a fully redundant solution.
- Move from Imgix to having Golang micro services which handle the resizing of images and use something like Belugacdn for the CDN. Beluga is $5k a month for a PB. (Or some other cheaper CDN if you don't like Beluga, but damn... imgix pricing)
I'm pretty sure that a savvy CTO could save at least $50k a month with a well designed project that does this over many months and achieves the same result and keeps the redundancy concerns for the small team.
I do realise however, why the team have done this. In the same position (with very few resources) I would probably have done the same. But damn, when a cost of a service gets up to a years salary ($120k) for a good developer. Time to seek alternatives.