Photobucket Now Charging $399 Per Year for 3rd Party Hosting

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I guess I'm a paying user - it will be interesting to see what happens at renewal time :D.
 
Me, a commercial scale user?!! They can't even be honest FFS.
 
markmifsud said:
John, you have your own website where you can link your images.
Click to expand...

Thanks Mark - it gives me an option.

I only spent the huge ad free subscrition amount of $14.99/annum a few weeks ago.
 
"its largest commercial scale users"??? I doubt anyone using PB to post photos on this forum (or any of the car forums I frequent) would count as a large commercial scale user!
 
I've just downloaded the two biggest libraries I kept on photobucket, which comprise approximately 250 images and take up some 72 MB of disk space. That's right, 72 megabytes. There are probably another 50 to 100 images scattered in a number of libraries, but downloading them is too much of a ballache given how rubbish PB has become. I have all the originals anyway so what's left can just wither on the vine.

Now, considering what a [sarcasm] prolific user I was [/sarcasm], what on earth made them think I was going to upgrade my account from its current ~100 MB (that's right, megabytes) to 500 GB? Nice work, idiots.

Cheers,

Gaz
 
Another option for the heavy users is get your own hosting, 1and1 do a unlimited storage deal for 3.99 a month +vat for the first year, then 6.99 after that. You could even get it between you and share the costs. maybe the forum could also look at selling off some storage space to some members?
 
I completely understand that Photobucket had a problem of their own creation, whereby they were funding free to user bandwidth. However, it's commercial suicide to take the heavy handed approach they have - unless of course it is a last roll of the dice as they were already half way around the U-bend :D

In the world of apps funded by micropayments, how on earth they think they can persuade their user base to part with such large sums beggars belief. A more sensible approach had to be to have a modest per month charge for light users and make a "per view" charge of small fractions of a cent per view for bigger, commercial, users. Which gives me an idea... ;)
 
I just received an email from Photobucket telling me I need to upgrade my account to their top banana version...

Links still seem to be working, but I'm going to be taking my images off of there asap. I'm glad I'm not a shareholder, because I think they have just shot themselves in the foot with these changes to their T&Cs. Pretty stupid and unlikely to generate the revenues they think it will IMHO.
 
Update, links are no longer working for me. Photobucket is toast!
 
We had a similar situation with LogMeIn a few years back. We had a Central commercial subscription but prices pretty much over night doubled & as it was already expensive for is as a small business after a few years of gradual but still four digit % increases we went through the pain of moving out customers over to Splashtop instead. $210 per year now as opposed to 2.5k!

It seems to be a model to cash flow & fund a business to grow an alleged value customer base with free subscription then sharply reverse this & start charging. The hassle & time for some is immense so they just need to pay it. We had to pay LogMeIn for a year when we didn't want to as to migrate several hundreds machines/users to another would take a great deal of time.

We try to use independent methods such as our own servers that we control but for some that is often not possible. It seems we can't trust many these days & many seem to be greedy & out for the cash.

Luckily we have our own servers in a datacentre & storage is cheap so to wack another server or drive in doesn't cost a lot. We have our own file transfer server. I could look to set up something for the forum to use if it was decided this could be a useful option. We have spare servers and space so an option if useful or needed.
 
Just received an email advising me of the new charges! So I shall look for something else. A lot of angry people on the photo forums I frequent.
 
I couldn't even get my photos back - when I did the 'download folder' option, I got those nasty "Give us money" images in place of some of the photos, so I had to laboriously click on every single photo, wait 10 seconds and put up with 1000 stupid ads before I could even download them!

I gave up after the 30th image, deleted my account and left a very grumpy reply as my reason for leaving.

Idiots, hope they go bust!
 
mj2k said:
I couldn't even get my photos back - when I did the 'download folder' option, I got those nasty "Give us money" images in place of some of the photos, so I had to laboriously click on every single photo, wait 10 seconds and put up with 1000 stupid ads before I could even download them!

I gave up after the 30th image, deleted my account and left a very grumpy reply as my reason for leaving.

Idiots, hope they go bust!
Click to expand...

Thats more or less what I did, I tried to download each part of the library but sometimes it took 10mins before the download was ready, even though each section was about 5mb. Decided I had better things to do so just deleted my account.
 
Just downloaded everything without issue (over 1GB). Had to wait 10mins for link, otherwise ok
 
Me too, download my remaining pics.
Closed the account and left a short, sharp reply. Account was opened in Jan 2005.
 
Got the email this morning, downloaded the little (29Mb) I had on there - virtually all photos for "how to" threads on one of my car forums, then deleted the account leaving them a succinct message of my thoughts on what they've done. Now have to decide where to re-host the photos (just tried Google drive, where I put photos for sharing with family and friends) but could not link a photo into a forum from there. seen recommendations for Postimage.org and imghost.io so will have to try those.
 
Chrishazle said:
Got the email this morning, downloaded the little (29Mb) I had on there - virtually all photos for "how to" threads on one of my car forums, then deleted the account leaving them a succinct message of my thoughts on what they've done. Now have to decide where to re-host the photos (just tried Google drive, where I put photos for sharing with family and friends) but could not link a photo into a forum from there. seen recommendations for Postimage.org and imghost.io so will have to try those.
Click to expand...

Try this for using Google Photos in posts, generates a direct link one can easily insert in a post

https://ctrlq.org/google/photos/?_ga=2.45173220.1389181564.1499604798-536097360.1499604798
 
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