Cloudinary is Fantastic!

Both the auto-upload and fetch apis are perfect for use cases where you are proscribed from serving images from an origin domain.

When building an MLS listing site, my team was grateful to be spared what we thought would be a significant development effort.

Screen capture of Massive cloudinary usage

Until You Serve Images at Scale!

When site expanded to a nation-wide inventory, our Cloudinary costs went from several hundred dollars per month to over $2,500!. They were projected to hit $5000 per month before long.

Screen capture of Massive cloudinary usage

imaginary.stripmall.software

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.

I've release it on .

Batteries are not included!

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 supporting a number of different "recipes", like different storage mechanisms and cdns.

If interest in the project was high, I could be persuaded to work on it.

If you want to know more...

What's the big idea here?

  • Our tech is supposed to make us more productive, more free. Yet everywhere, everyone seems endlessly shackled to their screens.
  • Once we decide to build something it takes way to long to get something in front of users.