I’ve decided to finally pull the plug on my photo sharing website, Lensmob.
As I’ve written previously I’ve kept Lensmob running as a hobby project for a number years. I still think it’s pretty neat.
Unfortunatly, it’s time now to shut it down.
- Even my friends and family pretty much all use Apple Photos. It’s pretty hard to compete with.
- Since starting this “hobby”, I’ve had two kids. Having kids doesn’t mean there is no time for hobbies, but I must be extra careful about where I spend my time.
- The service I use for photo uploads (non-email) raised their prices from $9 a month to $49. Switching to some other method is possible but would take time that I don’t want to invest.
- AWS costs, while not huge, is a noticable personal expense. If this was an active project, I would say it’s worth it. But facing the fact that I’m not actualy trying to grow this service makes it hard to justify.
I’m happy Lensmob was useful for people. While not a runaway success, people did used it. As of today, Lensmob had:
- 11k total users
- 3k albums
- 400k photos
- 400 active users / month
I’ll try to keep some of this data around for a while, if any user has an emergency situation where they didn’t have a copy of all their albums photos, I can probably dig it out for them. Drop me an email.