Until You Serve Images at Scale!
When site expanded to a nation-wide inventory, our Cloudinary costs balooned from several hundred dollars per month to over $2,500!. They were projected to hit $5000 per month before long.
Both the auto-upload and fetch apis are perfect for use cases where you are proscribed from serving images from an origin domain. This is generally the case for content aggregation sites.
When building an MLS listing site, my team was grateful to be spared what at the time we thought would be a significant development effort.
When site expanded to a nation-wide inventory, our Cloudinary costs balooned from several hundred dollars per month to over $2,500!. They were projected to hit $5000 per month before long.
Turns out the basic problem could be solved with a few dozen lines of javascript, a gcloud bucket, and the Cloudflare cdn. Image serving and processing costs for the site are down to less then $100 per month.
The current solution works perfectly with Cloudflare and gcloud and reproduces much of the auto-upload api, including image resizing. You can read the details on the github repo, but I can imagine the basic solution being expanded to support a variety of "recipes"; different storage mechanisms and cdns. For example, it could easily be extended to support aws s3, and CloudFront.
If interest in the project was high, I could be persuaded to work on it.
Got an idea? Let's talk: robert [at] stripmall [dot] software