Unsplash [1] was a side-project for our company freelance developer and designer platform, Crew [2] (Crew was later sold to Dribbble; Unsplash now operates independently).
We knew as creators that finding beautiful, useable imagery was one of the hardest challenges in any creative project, so we decided after shooting some photos for our homepage header image, to give the rest of the photos from the shoot away for free for anyone to use.
We setup a $19 tumblr theme, a domain, and posted the site to here.
What happened next was amazing: the site was flooded with traffic thanks to trending on HN, thousands of photos were downloaded on the first day, and most shockingly to us, other creatives began submitting their own photography to Unsplash.
Fast forward a year later and Unsplash was the main source of traffic and revenue for the parent company Crew. I think it peaked at around 60% of our monthly revenue due to customers finding Crew from a simple 'Made by Crew' link on Unsplash. At the same time, Unsplash was doing around 1M downloads a month.
We eventually sold Crew to Dribbble to focus full time on Unsplash, so it's no longer a side project. It's grown a lot since those early days, with more than 20M photo downloads every month, half a million free-to-use photos, and is integrated into thousands of applications, including Trello, Adobe, and more.
If you're interested in more about Unsplash, we've got all the main milestones here: https://unsplash.com/history
Bang on right. That's exactly how we're looking at it.
One thing we also consider as well is the overhead of adding another person to our team. We're learning a lot as we go (we've never built anything like this), so we have to be very careful that each teammate we bring on is aligned on vision, has the tools and resources they need to be successful and make smart autonomous decisions, and can fit into the current team without disrupting too much of the other teammates. That means that we can't just double our team size overnight and stick two new people on optimizations and cost reduction, even if it financially and procedurally made sense.
So the resizing alone makes Imgix very valuable to us. We're in an interesting situation though, where we have relatively few `master` images, but hundreds of renders per image, which are then seen millions of times each month. That's a perfect fit with Imgix's pricing model.
We tried Imgix on a few other products where we had tens of thousands of images being uploaded each month and only seen a couple hundred times per image. That became prohibitively expensive — which is probably a similar situation that you ended up in (high number of `master` images to render ratio).
In addition to realtime resizing, we use:
- face detection
- typesetting
- overlays
- cropping/point of interest cropping
- color palette
- exif/image metadata
- client hints
- automatic content negotiation
Pretty much everything except their watermarking endpoint haha ;)
This is stuff we've absolutely thought hard about. Believe me when I say that I would love to cut the costs by switching providers for certain things, but the tradeoffs at our current size aren't worth it in our opinion.
I'm working on another post which outlines the tradeoffs of the different services and why we chose the ones that we use. That's probably the missing piece here — we've thrown out a lot of numbers but didn't give the reasons behind it (we wanted to keep the article focused and short).
Re justify-ing the cost, we absolutely can justify the cost. We've thought about all of the things that we spend time on and we wouldn't do something unless we thought it was the best use of our resources.
Unsplash [1] was a side-project for our company freelance developer and designer platform, Crew [2] (Crew was later sold to Dribbble; Unsplash now operates independently).
We knew as creators that finding beautiful, useable imagery was one of the hardest challenges in any creative project, so we decided after shooting some photos for our homepage header image, to give the rest of the photos from the shoot away for free for anyone to use.
We setup a $19 tumblr theme, a domain, and posted the site to here.
What happened next was amazing: the site was flooded with traffic thanks to trending on HN, thousands of photos were downloaded on the first day, and most shockingly to us, other creatives began submitting their own photography to Unsplash.
Fast forward a year later and Unsplash was the main source of traffic and revenue for the parent company Crew. I think it peaked at around 60% of our monthly revenue due to customers finding Crew from a simple 'Made by Crew' link on Unsplash. At the same time, Unsplash was doing around 1M downloads a month.
We eventually sold Crew to Dribbble to focus full time on Unsplash, so it's no longer a side project. It's grown a lot since those early days, with more than 20M photo downloads every month, half a million free-to-use photos, and is integrated into thousands of applications, including Trello, Adobe, and more.
If you're interested in more about Unsplash, we've got all the main milestones here: https://unsplash.com/history
1 - https://unsplash.com 2 - https://crew.co