Everpix is Shutting Down

https://www.everpix.com/landing.html#adieu

by uptown • 13 years ago

139 89 13 years ago

everpix.com

spaetzel• 13 years ago

Very disappointing. I've been promoting Everpix to my friends and family, and had paid for an annual plan myself.

Will need to hunt down a new alternative.

alariccole• 13 years ago

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.

keithwarren3• 13 years ago

Building a competitor as well (http://pivotal.ws)

uptown4• 13 years ago

Additional reporting about why they're shutting down: http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-d...

hospadam2• 13 years ago

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?

toomuchtodo2• 13 years ago

https://www.dropbox.com/features/photos

https://trovebox.com/

https://loom.com/

http://www.smugmug.com/

and of course, http://www.flickr.com/

cschmidt• 13 years ago

also http://www.zenfolio.com/

hospadam2• 13 years ago

One of the key features of Everpix was the "set and forget" capability. Also their dupe-detection was really good.

Do any of those do that? I guess Dropbox is the most established... I'd hate to be in this same situation in a year from now with Loom...

Numberwang• 13 years ago

Dropbox would be ridiculously expensive to host photos with. Not a valid option.

nloui• 13 years ago

I just rejoined Thislife.com, now part of Shutterfly. For Smugmug lovers, I also created Smugsync which will sync iPhoto to Smugmug => smugsync.net

acomjean• 13 years ago

For what its worth Flickr gives you 1 TB for free now. Thats what I'm using.

I have friends that are happy with the smugmug app that uploads to a private album..

omfg• 13 years ago

http://www.picturelife.com seems the most similar.

timcederman• 13 years ago

backblaze.com

kansas• 13 years ago

use Tonido (http://www.tonido.com)

jzzskijj• 13 years ago

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.

Osmium• 13 years ago

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.

alphakappa• 13 years ago

This is sad. Everpix was a fantastic solution to a common problem, so it's unfortunate that even with such good execution, they couldn't go anywhere.

uptown4• 13 years ago

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.

http://koken.me/

revorad• 13 years ago

Thanks for that. I'd never heard of Koken but it looks very good.

alok-g• 13 years ago

I cannot believe this is free! The website puts this right too: "Free download. Seriously."

Only thing I cannot figure from their website is how to upload pictures and albums in bulk. Does someone know if this is possible?

uptown4• 13 years ago

The interface provides a drag-and-drop way to upload images, or if you're a Lightroom user - you can publish with the plugin directly from Lightroom.

gilesvangruisen• 13 years ago

Just signed up less than 12 hours ago. Cool.

nathanduvall• 13 years ago

Same here. The last of my 50,000+ photos just finished uploading. Just my luck.

clarkdave• 13 years ago

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.

radnor• 13 years ago

Agreed. Getting a daily Everpix Flashback email was the reason I chose to subscribe to Everpix.

3JPLW• 13 years ago

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.

tombot2• 13 years ago

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

dublinben• 13 years ago

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.

citricsquid• 13 years ago

If you look at the figures in this verge article it looks like the S3 costs were almost immaterial.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-d...

sameer_sundresh2• 13 years ago

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.

brianjolney• 13 years ago

just started using them, the platform was actually really interesting and well developed. sad to see them go...

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

Eventually "growth hacking" is going to be replaced by "sustainable business plan hacking".

ssharp• 13 years ago

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.

mbesto• 13 years ago

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."

[1] http://startupsunplugged.com/startup-data/selling-shovels-in...

smaili• 13 years ago

Very sad news to hear. Best of luck to everyone on the team.

cyanbane• 13 years ago

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.

cbhl• 13 years ago

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/.

leejoramo• 13 years ago

Looks like the TroveBox hosted service has increase price dramatically, and going for a more professional market.

libovness2• 13 years ago

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.

swisspol• 13 years ago

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.

libovness2• 13 years ago

Shouldn't that be factored into the cost structure? What does it matter that the margin on the storage costs was cash flow positive?

awad• 13 years ago

The personnel costs of a 7 person startup really jumped out at me. Am I the only one that was surprised?

terhechte2• 13 years ago

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.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

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.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

Might not be a bad idea considering the user presumably still has their pictures on disk when they want to browse the whole collection.

keithwarren3• 13 years ago

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.

armandososa2• 13 years ago

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.

keithwarren3• 13 years ago

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.

armandososa2• 13 years ago

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.

esusatyo• 13 years ago

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.

basch• 13 years ago

Bitcasa is 100 dollars a year for unlimited data. By comparison 20 dollars a month is expensive, even if it is a great service.

jonny_eh• 13 years ago

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.

mrjatx• 13 years ago

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

uptown4• 13 years ago

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.

ukd1• 13 years ago

Checkout Loom - https://loom.com

oceanic• 13 years ago

How likely is it that Loom will go out of business in a year too?

jonkelly• 13 years ago

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.

gexla• 13 years ago

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.

nawitus• 13 years ago

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.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

This is usually how running out of money works. If they had 6 months runway they wouldn't shut down the company.

j2bax• 13 years ago

Well thats disappointing. This looks like the service I've been looking for for all these years.

jrnkntl• 13 years ago

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.

kunle• 13 years ago

Surprised Yahoo didn't buy them

dr0p• 13 years ago

really sad. They messed up on a lot of aspects but build a great product.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

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.

nl• 13 years ago

Next someone complains (again!) about an aquihire on HN, and how it means the company is shutting down I'll just point at this as the alternative.

hobs• 13 years ago

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.

vojant• 13 years ago

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.

thomaspun• 13 years ago

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.

raghus• 13 years ago

https://www.thislife.com/

Pricing is here: https://www.thislife.com/pricing

Disclosure: I work at SFLY

sutterbomb• 13 years ago

For clarity, raghus' disclosure was about working for Shutterfly, who acquired ThisLife earlier in 2013.

Everpix is Shutting Down

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