Is it me?
First Zang Zing and now Everpix.
Zang Zing was a great web based photo sharing service that I subscribed to and covered on ScreenCastsOnline. It had great integration with various services and allowed you consolidate all your photos in a single service. It was great!
It closed down in 2012 and I was bitterly disappointed.
Then Everpix came onto the scene. Similar to Zang Zing but much better. It allowed you to consolidate all your photos from many different sources and de-duplicated them for you. No more worrying if you had uploaded this picture or that picture in Aperture or Flickr, Everpix took them all and sorted them for you. Heck, it even allowed you to send photos directly from your iOS device camera roll.
It had a great iOS App that enabled you to access all the de-duplicated photos from your iPhone and a really neat "highlights" feature that emailed you every day.
It wasn't perfect but it was headed in the right direction and had huge potential. I was more than happy to pay from an Annual subscription.
Yesterday they announced they were closing down.
Nooooooo!!!!!
Such a brilliant service was unsustainable using the business model they had. Basically, they weren't getting enough paying subscribers to maintain the business and to pay for the hosting. In effect, you could get unlimited photo storage for a single annual payment or just $50 or pay nothing and get unlimited storage of all you photos for the past 12 months.
In hindsight, the pricing was completely bonkers!
Such a shame as it really was a fantastic service.
The failure wasn't the tech, it was the unsustainable business model.
I wish that startups would figure this out at the beginning. When the writing was on the wall with Everpix, they should have approached the existing customer base. I would have been happy to pay significantly more than I was paying to keep the service alive. I would have happily paid pro rate based on the amount of storage I was using.
Stop expecting the paying users to subsidise the free accounts, or if you do, price it so it's sustainable.
Dropbox did it for goodness sake.
Now the search for an alternative - I don't think I have the stomach for another small player, I think I'll just have to put up with Flickr for now.
Absolutley gutted!