Being into mobile app development since 2014, Nimblechapps has always had a knack of finding ways to optimize the costs for hosting, storage, usage, and other auxiliary expenses which are not directly related to the development but, assist in bringing the operational costs down indirectly. We believe, being a leading mobile app development company it’s our duty to share the hacks which we implement with the developer community.

As a mobile app development company, one such expense is the expense of hosting images and other such graphical assets on cloud that are used in almost all the apps today. Apps today are not devoid of images. Images are a necessity to be used in the app with the inclusivity norm.

Hosting and usage of the images are often costly due to the size and resolution of the images and almost all the hosting providers charging quite a hefty fees to host the images. Cloudinary is one such platform that is a cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company specializing in media management - specifically for images and videos - on websites and mobile apps. Usually, it’s the first choice for the software development companies when it comes to hosting the assets.

However, there is one catch, Cloudinary provides a combined capacity of 25GB between all the projects in the free plan which for the development companies becomes a deal breaker at some point in time.

Issue we faced

Working on 100s of projects for the clients, we too faced a similar situation where we had to create multiple cloudinary accounts for free to host the images and the over all management of the accounts becomes a tedious process when the apps scale up and as the high resolution assets are used. Cloudinary’s paid accounts are quite expensive which starts from 99$ per month.

Enter Wasabi.com

Wasabi is a cloud storage provider specializing in “hot cloud storage” where the data needs to be accessed quite often and quickly. Wasabi positions itself as a game‑changer in cloud storage by offering affordable, simple, predictable, and secure storage with no fees for data egress or API requests.

Wasabi’s main advantage is it’s pricing structure. While cloudinary charges about 99$ per month, Wasabi charges about 7$ per month and that too for a 1TB storage with no fees on egress or API requests as mentioned above.

Wasabi is quickly becoming the much accepted option in comparison to Cloudinary for hot cloud storage of images, videos, and other assets.

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The hack

Cloudinary lovers would argue on the main point here that similar to Cloudinary, Wasabi doesn’t provide the image manipulation functions on runtime when the images and other assets are pulled from the Cloudinary. Well, this is where we have found a great hack that can easily save the costs without compromising on the functionality and flow.

What we have come up with is:

  • We store the assets in Wasabi.com cloud storage. Even with the paid account we get 1TB storage at a 10% cost of what Cloudinary offers.

  • Once the images are stored, if we need to call them, we get the images process through IMG Proxy, a fast, secure, and self-hosted server for on-the-fly image processing - all done within your own infrastructure, not through a third-party SaaS. It enables real-time resizing, conversion, and optimization of images via simple URLs.

  • Once the images are process with IMG Proxy, the resultant URL is called to get the expected outcome which would have come through an expensive solution of Cloudinary.

One might say that the entire process is quite length but, when the budgets are limited this hack works perfect. It’s a tried and tested hack and can easily save costs.

Conclusion

We have truly found Wasabi a blessing and are considering to replace Cloudinary with it as a full-fledged cloud hosting provider to be used for the assets to be used in the App. Being into mobile app development domain, we don’t only develop the apps but, develop it in a cost effective way. We can easily say that through this we provide the FinOps consultingas well 😀

If you are looking for such smart solutions, Nimblechapps is always ready to find new ways to save the development costs. Let’s connect.