Transloadit is offering file uploading and processing as a service.<p>http://transloadit.com/<p>At this point we handle image resizing, video encoding and storage in your own Amazon S3 bucket.<p>We just launched 1 week ago and have started to sign up the first few customers.<p>If you are potentially interested in our services, please take our 8 question survey:<p>http://tinyurl.com/369un29<p>And of course, ask me anything!
Pro:<p>- The idea is sound. Value-added services like this are exploding all over the web<p>- The value-prop is clear<p>- The feature set is clearly explained<p>Con:<p>- As others have said, the pricing would work better as pennies per upload -- makes it cheap for rapid prototypers, whom are going to be a big part of this market<p>- Uploading via a third party raises privacy issues, even if you're not providing storage<p>- I suspect the market here is too small: it's the gap between people who know how to integrate your product and people who know enough to build it themselves. However, it's a big Internet and I've been wrong before about the sizes of markets (for instance, Tumblr!)<p>So go for it, and good luck :-)
Very interesting!<p>My first impression of the homepage is that the graphics are a little all over the place (in terms of consistency, not layout). Your logo has a pretty slick look to it, while the large balsamiq image is rough and 2D, and the "Let us do the processing" images are somewhat rough and 3D.<p>The forgot password page layout looks off to me, the recover button is displaying to the upper right of the email label.<p>The signup link at the bottom of the login page directs to a different account creation form than the signup links on the plans/pricing page.<p>"Proceed to enter credit card" seems a bit rough or robotic (can't really think of a good word to describe it honestly), maybe it could be changed to something like "Proceed to finish signup".<p>Although I didn't look too deeply, the docs look great!<p>PS: I'm not a designer, I only pretend to be one on the internet, so take all of that design advice with a grain of salt.
Well done Felix!<p>1. Great intro and explanation of everything.<p>2. Remove the plans. Charge per transload.<p>3. Add a form to test-drive a transload.<p>4. Add a real-time stat to the front page: number of transloads since you started reading this page (or something to that effect).<p>5. I like the "Let us know what pricing you would like." idea.<p>6. Build your own feedback form. Just a simple textarea with a button. Don't make the user search through a forum to check for duplicate questions before giving their feedback.<p>7. Re: "We are also the first commercial software / infrastructure as a service product built on node.js." I know of a web-based app launched on Node in April but you've probably been going in beta longer.<p>8. Could you figure out a way to be able to just start using transloadit without signing up (with some kind of expiring mechanism for accounts which don't go through with a deferred registration)?
I like the site. Very nice job. I don't know how big your market it is. It appears to be targeted at developers, but we are the ones most likely to roll our own solution to this type of thing. I think I would be more apt to want to buy a one time license and run the software myself, then to commit to a monthly service fee.<p>Perhaps you should looking at a consumer market where you would do the work and then host it yourself for them giving them a link, or publish it to a subset of popular sites (facebook, flickr, youtube, wordpress, etc.) Your typical users on these sites will not/cannot leverage libraries to do what your service does. Make it easy for them to just upload & publish so they don't have to think about it.<p>Just my thoughts.
On my list of things to do today is build an image upload page for user profile images. I've been looking at using imagemagick.<p>Maybe it's just me, but I have a bit of a NDH attitude towards this kind of service, and particularly at the pricing you are offering.<p>I'm not saying you won't be successful, that's just my two cents.<p>I suspect it is going to take me a few hours to figure out the imagemajick stuff. These seem to be quite a few tutorials on how to use it with Rails, so we'll see.<p>You aren't offering storage, and I actually think that is a good thing, as I wouldn't trust something like user images to a 3rd party start-up.<p>I guess I'm really wondering who your target market is.<p>I don't think (but I could be wrong) that the code to handle this sort of file-upload stuff is weeks worth of work. So if I can get it done in two hours, lets say that costs a company $100, and that is code we own, run on our servers, and the only further cost is storage.<p>If the target market is non-programmers, are you offering enough features to make managing photos and video easy enough for them?<p>I can encode videos on lots of sites for free, and get them served without paying any storage or bandwidth fees.<p>So if we just focus on photos, and the heavy lifting you are doing is the resizing and thumbnails, is that something that a newby would want to do? Or is it something that is so complicated that a programmer wants to avoid doing it?<p>I think what you are providing is some very basic tools, which is good because it is easy to understand, but I just don't know if the tools you are providing are compelling enough.<p>I guess I'll go code up what I need for my service, and if it isn't done by this afternoon, maybe you'll have convinced me that I need your service.<p>But I think that may be a challenge you're facing. Do most programmers think they can do this on their own?
I am a designer so I'll just talk about the design.<p>It is excellent, the only change that you really must make is to add a "sign up now" button near the top (above the fold). Everything else is great design-wise.
This is interesting. Having been part of a startup which focused on video upload, encoding and streaming I think there is a market for this service. Past experience has shown me that one of the unplanned significant overheads of a service like this is the myriad of esoteric codecs out there and what they do to ffmpeg and related encoding tools. There is always a source or device that produces a video file which causes ffmpeg to hang or segfault on transcoding, or to output a flawed transcoded file with poor video or no sound, etc.<p>I'm curious how you deal with these 2 issues. The first issue being an infrastructure issue, where incoming media can cause problems for your tools, the second is a quality issue, where the output your tools produce may not be what the customer expects.<p>What is your plan to handle these 2 problems?
I really like the website, the API is well documented and the features looks good.<p>In my company we're currently using heywatch for encoding and after a rapid calcul it looks like you're cheaper.<p>We're paying 5c the video encoding and 10c for HD quality.<p>I'll have a deeper look this week.
Question: Is there a more secure way to set the parameters other than have them in a hidden form field? It appears that the end user can set the parameters just by changing POST values. I'd prefer that not be the case.