I remember there was another article about image uploads and content moderation (here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28684250), essentially saying that if you create a open uploading service, you WILL start getting lots of spammy images / abuse.

CF Images always seems like a LOT more $$ than other image hosting tools out there. What other service did you end up going with?

I often use Bunny CDN where it's $10 a month for UNLIMITED image alterations. They charge half a cent per gigabyte on traffic of the post processed image (in their bulk tier) along with 1 cent per gigabyte for storage.

The nearest competitor is likely over 10x more (Caveat: For the workloads I've applied this on).

We went with https://bunny.net/optimizer/transform-api

How does imgur stay alive, out of curiosity.

Ad and analytics money, https://www.thestockdork.com/how-does-imgur-make-money/

they also removed the private images part, and pivoted towards becoming a "social network" (several years too late). Honestly no idea how they stay alive.

Also honestly no idea why they never jumped on the NFT bandwagon.

Oh, they're also apparently a tiny team (<50) too, so that probably helps

Those are some seriously egregious egress fees!

Lucky for you that you don't check your bills on a quarter basis (3 months). It could have been another story to be reimbursed and the bills might have more than triple.

I would much more prefer if the service cost was tied to image operations instead of "displays".

I had a client a few years ago who was using another service for image hosting, and they were getting charged through the nose for it. This is before cloudflare had their own image CDN style service. The client's app made heavy use of URL based image transforms. And we didn't want to lose that - so it seemed like they were a little stuck.

The website itself was already using cloudflare's CDN. So I added a simple cloudflare URL rule to redirect all requests hitting /images/XXX to the 3rd party image hosting service. Within a month our client's image hosting bill dropped from $~10k/month down to about $90/month, which I felt great about.

I did made one terrible mistake though - I forgot to tell our client about the configuration change. So cue a monday morning panicked phone call from our client when they got their bill, asking what on earth was happening that caused all their web traffic to disappear overnight. They thought (based on the bill) that their website must be broken and they were freaking out about it! Oops!

Your post leaves it a little bit unclear what you actually did.

Are you saying that

1. Originally all requests for images went directly to the egregiously-priced image host

2. You changed that traffic to be routed through Cloudflare instead so it would be cached

3. That reduced requests to your image host enough to cut your bill by 99%

?

The client was using an image host which supported image transforms. They uploaded all their images there and were using a lot of image transforms from that host on their website. So, HOST/img/123?scale=1.3&color=greyscale type business. They were paying per image loaded from the site.

We tucked cloudflare in front of the image host using a URL rewrite rule. Cloudflare's cache reduced the number of requests made to the image host by 99% or something.

Thanks for confirming! Pretty amazing what some well-placed caching can do.