I'm a little ashamed to say that this is the first time the shutting down of a service almost brings me to tears. A couple months ago, burglars entered my house and stoled --among other valuable stuff-- our laptops (wife's and mine) our cameras and with them a lot of pictures from our first year married. While I was able to recover some from iCloud and Dropbox and instagram, my wife was crying hopelessly for the lost of her photos.
The truth is, handling photos and backups is hard and time consuming. I was so happy when I started using Everpix just last month. I was so sure that I will never have to worry about backups and storage and that my photos would be always safe. Naive, I know, but I wanted to believe.
Have they charged me $20 a month, I would have been more than happy to pay.
Check out CrashPlan for backup. You can either pay them to store your data in their cloud, or backup to an alternate computer/location for free using their sync software. It's great, and cost-effective peace of mind. It does nothing to make your photos easily accessible for browsing purposes - but knowing you've got a copy of your photos in an alternate location is probably more-important.
Truth is, there aren't as many people like you and me who would pay $20 a month to Everpix. So many people are just not worried about their data until something bad happens to them.
I kept telling every single friend every time I see them post data loss grief status update on Facebook - use Dropbox, use CrashPlan, use iCloud, etc etc. And yet it seems like they either think that their data is not worth $5 a month, or that once accident happens to them it can't happen for the second time.
What the world really needs is an education of how important it is to backup our data.
Right, people only value their data once it's gone. Here's an idea: free and seamless backing up of your data, but if you want to access it in the case of loss, you pay through the nose.
I've lost years of pictures twice now by relying on image hosting sites that eventually shut down. First was Lightbox7, the last I THOUGHT was Photobucket but that appears to be online so I'm not sure which that was. Both times it was infuriating and I don't recall ever receiving any warning when Lightbox7 went dark. Lost all of my high school/middle school pictures (I'm 30 now, this was a long time ago).
I'd warn you to not rely on any startup and to make sure your data, if its critical, is dispersed between different services, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Sky Drive. I've not used it yet, but you can sync files between cloud services via CloudHQ; https://www.cloudhq.net/dropbox
Family photos are the only items I don't think should be stored on the cloud as they are too important and too large. About a year ago I bought 2 external drives and we back up our MacBook at home and in another location. You can get 2 multi-terabyte drives for a little over $200. Sounds like a lot more trouble than it is and provides a great sense of security that our pix are secure.
Consider this, the service probably would have been killed off one way or another. If it didn't die from a lack of funds, then it may have died from being shut down after being acquired.
I was pretty happy with clipboard.com for bookmarks. They didn't charge anything. The service got shut down after Salesforce gobbled them up.
Tt doesn't sound like that was the issue here. They had a functional business model, as they have specifically said that their user revenues outpaced their customer acquisition and service costs. They had positive customer lifetime value. The issue was that they couldn't acquire enough customers to pay their overhead.
It's actually a case where "growth hacking" would have been good for them because they needed more users to justify their fixed costs.
> It's actually a case where "growth hacking" would have been good for them because they needed more users to justify their fixed costs.
Here's the current crux of the startup world cost structure - it's not variable based on business solution, but rather technical solution - and this is problematic. Here's the general group-thought - the more money we put into a company the quicker it can sustain growth.
Let's say (none of this following data is accurate, just giving an example) it costs $20k to run the servers for Pinterest (which can make $5 per user on advertising) and it costs the same $20k to run Everpix (which is a freemium service, that makes on average $1.50 per user). As long as profit margins are sustainable both companies can survive. The problem is, no tech startup today I know of really assesses their cost structure today because "its cheap". We get the "scale as we grow" cost structures of providers and just assume that economies of scale mean that the more users we get the cheaper it gets. However, it's often is the case that the things that don't scale (humans and human costs) are not entirely sustainable and nearly as predictable.
Very generally speaking, I believe this means a few things:
1) One business model will tend to outweigh others (today this is advertising)
2) Shovel sellers are the more sustainable winners here.[1]
3) I think we'll slowly start to see a re-shift to offshore development as the ecosystem of "get code out the door technologies" (Rails, Node, PaaS-plays, etc) become much more mature in other markets (as it happened during the first .com burst).
One of my favorite Drucker quotes resonates well:
"For the problem of any business is not the maximization of profit but the achievement of sufficient profit to cover the risks of economic activity and thus to avoid loss."
I've never used Everpix ... though I considered signing up a while back due to the critical acclaim they seemed to have achieved. But I've given up hosting my photos with paid services. The best alternative I've found is Koken. It is free software you host yourself, and provides great interface to manage, publish, and share your photos. Additionally, they have plugins from Lightroom to publish directly from your desktop to your host. I'm certain it lacks many of the algorithmic and aggregating features Everpix offered ... but for organizing my collection, and sharing it in a place I know won't decide to go out of business, it's worked well for me.
Everpix was one of the best $5/month I spent. I would have been willing to spend far more for their services. I wish they would have tried to bump the price up to save the service. Having one place for all my photos made me exceptionally happy. Even my wife absolutely loved Everpix.
I guess I need to find an alternative... what are they?
The problem with Dropbox is that photos are eating space on my local hard drive, unless I manually manage them. Everpix was perfect from the syncing perspective. Sharing could have been improved and I think they should have put more effort to private sharing experience and that would have helped with growth too.
That still presents the problem of frequent uploads: you have to sync a folder on your hard drive, and then follow up with unsync when it gets too large, and then set up a new folder for the next batch.
Will just say for anyone that never used Everpix that flickr, zenfolio and smugmug don't really do the same job. Yes they all host photos, but the whole point is that it's an automated process, imports from multiple sources and does magic like de-duplication.
sounds exactly like zenfolio, flickr etc. They all supposer set and forget and they all do duplicate detection. If they didn't and everpix had a real value proposition they might still be going.
I wish they would have tried to bump the price up to save the service.
The bump would have to been at least something like tenfold to solve anything. According to the article they were -$2,294,818.17 south at the end and their subscription revenue was only $254,060.57. I'm quite confident that would have eaten their 12.4 percent conversion ratio badly.
Amazon Glacier seems applicable at this point: around $1000/mo to archive the entire Everpix collection, then work out (cheap) pricing for people to retrieve their photos. Just a thought, pursuant to not losing everything outright.
I can't help but think that their reliance on (very expensive) Amazon Web Services played a part in their collapse. It looks like they also failed to grow enough, but it should have been possible to sustain a paying service.
That's right. AWS infrastructures costs were already being covered by subscription income. We also had prototypes ready to flesh out to reduce per-user costs as we scale up, but were not at that point yet.
If the only problem was scale... how is it even possible that a VC didn't invest? You had a proven product, fanatically loyal customers (including myself), and unbelievable growth potential. Everpix is a textbook case for venture capital.
Even more amazing to me is why someone like Apple didn't purchase Everpix. They're in desperate need of competent web services, and god knows they have the cash. Of all possible futures for Everpix, I could never have seen outright shuttering as a possibility.
There's two levels to the scale problem: (a) sufficient scale for a successful small business, and (b) sufficient scale to repay a whole VC fund, with interest. VCs agreed that (a) was achievable, but they really need (b) and didn't see that with us.
Tools for private photo collections are important, but don't have the same sort of explosive viral growth curve of, say, a public social network. Even private social networks have a more difficult time scaling up quickly compared to the more open but less privacy-respecting alternatives.
Even so, Everpix is a tool that literally everyone needs -- organization, deduplication, backup, and daily refreshers of all your photos. I was contemplating buying a subscription for my elderly mother, since she has no idea where her pictures are or how to access them. To say nothing of the rest of my social network.
Maybe I'm still in mourning, but if I ran a VC fund, Everpix seems like a sure investment. You certainly had much more potential for growth -- and steady revenue -- than another Instagram clone or internet radio service. And once your growth eclipsed your fixed costs (which could have been reduced further by running your own servers when you reached an appropriate size), you'd be consistently profitable. And since Everpix provided such a valuable service, your customers would advertise on your behalf.
However, even I discovered Everpix only a few weeks ago, just before The Verge published a write-up about cloud photo backups -- and crowned Everpix the winner. You were just reaching a critical mass of followers... I can't help but think Everpix would have been a wild success if it stuck around for just another year.
I've stored a lot of images on Everpix that I actually may not have on other physical media here anymore. Can you confirm that you're going to allow exporting of data? Otherwise I'd set out now and write an export-script that downloads all my data, I'd rather not invest that time though.
Users of this service may want to consider setting up an installation of Trovebox (formerly OpenPhoto). You can grab the sources from https://github.com/photo and host it yourself, or sign up for a paid hosted account at https://trovebox.com/.
As someone who had 10,000+ photos in the service and was recommending Everpix to everyone I'm pretty sad. Really was set and forget software, used it regularly to dig out photos and share with others. Super sad that it's going away, hopefully I can find another service which is half as good
Until a company sets up a separate trust designed specificially for handling ongoing long-term operations it's never going to be reasonable to trust a company will continue to host your content for any reasonable amount of time.
It also strikes me as ... odd? I guess that we have these examples of companies declaiming they will be around "forever", they even put it in their name, and yet only surviving for about 27 months. It reminds me of teenagers in "love".
It'll be nice when, if ever, the industry matures out of this state.
Here's a wild thought: open source the client apps, so maybe it can be rewritten to work with Flickr or any other service. That way it keeps the 'set it and forget it' alive. Because right now I can't think of a tool that does the same so smoothly for Flickr.
If you were an Everpix fan I would love to hear from you, our startup Pivotal (http://pivotal.ws) is doing something very similar and we would love to hear what you liked and didnt like about Everpix and how you would make it better.
I liked everything about Everpix, except that they didn't charge enough to keep the lights on. Please don't make the same mistake. I'd want to trust you.
We are looking at 9.95, 19.95 and 35.95 a month based on storage levels and other benefits.
The 'other' benefits is something that sets us apart, with our service you get to choose some photos each month and we will mail 3x5 copies to you (or you can have them sent to someone else like parents or grandparents), monthly merchandising deals like 75% off a photo book or calendar.
PictureLife manages pricing based on storage. One of the things I liked about Everpix was that it was $5/mo no limits (AFAIK). If you can figure out a no limit pricing that would be great, it doesn't have to be $5/mo.
I am also a Flickr Pro member. I always thought Flickr+Everpix was a great combination. You can always create a set of apps (desktop/mobile) and have users connect with Flickr accounts to store the pictures. I won't mind paying one time $50-100 for a good Flickr uploader that works more like Everpix.
It seems to me that "no limits" scales when you can expect people to average out their usage. But when people just accumulate usage I'd suspect that it becomes harder to sustain. There has to come a known point where a user is costing more than they're paying - and when every active user is bound to reach that point sooner or later, I can't see it could be sustained.
Sigh, I really liked Everpix. I was just about to move some of my older data into the cloud and "go full in". This is really sad to hear. You guys build a great product, sad to see it go.
Edit: I purchased the yearly $40 plan and would definitely have continued paying / using.
I think we have deeper issue here:
Users expect services to be cheap (because it's internet) and founders give them it using investors money. After they use all money they just shut down. Everpix is only another example.
I really liked Everpix as a "fire and forget" method for backing up my photos. It's a shame they're shutting down.
As an alternative I'll probably switch to Dropbox, who have been improving their 'photo upload' features, one of which is the ability to automatically upload from iPhoto (similar to how Everpix did it).
One of my favourite features in Everpix was the "1 year ago today" emails they sent, which picked a few random photos from a year ago and dropped them in my inbox. That was a really nice touch.
It was a 'this day in history' — not only was it one year ago, it was any photo taken on that day. Which was even more awesome. I have 15 year old photos in my library. It was really cool to slowly relive long-passed vacations and trips that way. Very sad to see them go.
I tried them for about 3 months, was not a bad service. I had some issues with the methods in which they allowed for navigation of photos and how easy (or hard) it was to find a specific photo in a large collection. I ended up going back to Flickr. That being said, the display UI was great and I had hoped to see them pressuring other sites in the same space. Good luck to the team in whatever they decide to work on next.
I really liked Everpix and was a paying customer. A real shame. I appreciate that they're giving refunds.
I used it as my photo library in the cloud. I have far too many photos to put on my phone, but it was nice to be able to look them up to show people when I'm out. Not sure what to use now! Flickr? To be honest, there isn't another service I trust to keep my photos private, and that's what Everpix was billed as.
I never use their service but I have been following them. It's sad to see them go as I think they have a good product.
From the comments, there seems to be a consensus on not charging enough. It'd be interesting to hear from the team why they didn't try charging more or even going thru the crowd funding route.
As someone who has been working on sort of a competitor...this makes me sad. Everpix was a great tool, such a great tool that it helped push my company in a different direction. I would've been very proud to build what they did.
While it isnt photo specific, backblaze is an awesome way to backup everything, and have a simple and quick interface for restoring your data.
You can even buy hard drives with all your data on it from them, pretty cool.
December 15th, 2013 seems like a too little time. A two month vacation might mean that someone loses all of his photos, even though one of the main points of this kind of service is backup of photos.
This sounds cruel, but Everpix was effectively operating as a Ponzi scheme. They offered services (photo storage) that they couldn't afford unless new money came in. Then the money stopped.
Actually, Everpix was making around $40K / month from subscription revenue covering the infrastructure costs for both free and paid users with some margin. The problem is (obviously) having enough to cover fixed costs as well i.e. mostly personnel costs.
No, I thought the personnel costs / salaries was bonkers too.
EDIT: I read some of the comments on the Verge's page and it seems that the salaries were over a few years, and apparently that isn't bonkers money! I must be out of touch.
The truth is, handling photos and backups is hard and time consuming. I was so happy when I started using Everpix just last month. I was so sure that I will never have to worry about backups and storage and that my photos would be always safe. Naive, I know, but I wanted to believe.
Have they charged me $20 a month, I would have been more than happy to pay.