Right. In my last two jobs, one of them had a relatively low volume of images (let's say, around 30k being requested per month) scaled to an arbitrary number of transformations, whilst the other had a high volume of images (millions) with a low number of transformations.
In both cases, the cost of doing it ourselves (using something like thumbor) would have been a few thousand per month. In the former example, imgix cost a few hundred, in the latter it would have cost in the hundreds of thousands.
imgix is the fastest of the services i've looked at (transformation time is roughly half what I got from cloudinary, and average response time is also about half), but its pricing model means it's completely unaffordable for certain types of product.
In both cases, the cost of doing it ourselves (using something like thumbor) would have been a few thousand per month. In the former example, imgix cost a few hundred, in the latter it would have cost in the hundreds of thousands.
imgix is the fastest of the services i've looked at (transformation time is roughly half what I got from cloudinary, and average response time is also about half), but its pricing model means it's completely unaffordable for certain types of product.