FrontGallery.com (my online photo gallery service)

[GRagland]

I am starting a online photo gallery service and I am interested in what you people think about this pricing structure. I am interested in what you pay now for your online photo gallery (if anything), how much size they give you, and any features you consider indespensible. One cool feature of FrontGallery is that you can register an unlimited amount of users under one gallery, basically allowing for the creation of small photo communities. The 1GB plan would be ideal for people who want to start a photo community (such as atot).

If you would like to try out FrontGallery I can set you up with a 1 month trial account.
FrontGallery.com is not up and running yet, but you can see an example gallery (my photographs) at http://www.frontgallery.com/gallery2_31805/gallery2/

$5/Month
$50/Year

250MB Space
1 Email Account (username@frontgallery.com)
Tech Support
Custom Banner (w/1 year subscription)

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$10/Month
$100/Year

500MB Space
3 Email Accounts
Tech Support
Custom Banner (w/1 year subscription)

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$15/Month
$150/Year
$5/Month for Additional 500MB Space

1GB Space
Unlimited Email Accounts
Tech Support
Custom Banner (w/1 year subscription)

 

[Whitecloak]

How will you compete against free pic hosting sites?

 

[Anubis]

Originally posted by: whitecloak
How will you compete against free pic hosting sites?

thats a good question, seeing as im guvng a few people more then his base plan on my site for absoutly nothing

 

[rh71]

Originally posted by: whitecloak
How will you compete against free pic hosting sites?

well the ones we're used to on AT allow only certain referring URLs. You can't hotlink to a pic or from a site. And for competing against the other free ones... no ads. And the capability to print directly on a web photo service like shutterfly is interesting...

EDIT>>> This is just a gallery from gallery.sourceforge ? Are you allowed to profit from this ?

 

[Zim Hosein]

GRagland, I don't pay for p0rn on-line, why would I pay for :camera: hosting?

 

[Mayfriday0529]

Originally posted by: rh71

EDIT>>> This is just a gallery from gallery.sourceforge ? Are you allowed to profit from this ?

I was thinking the same thing.

 

[RossMAN]

GRagland,

I think this would be considered advertising although you intend it to be a "service" for the AT community.

There are already at least 10 free pichosting services.

Your $5/mo or $50/yr plan isn't that great considering you can:
1) Register your own domain through GoDaddy.com for $6.95/yr
2) Sign up for web hosting through HostPC.com for $29.99 taking advantage of their current 2 for 1 sale which gives you web hosting, 600MB/10GB. You also get DirectAdmin with Installatron. Any newbie (including myself) can automatically install coppermine or menalto gallery in about 20 seconds.

All the above for under $40/yr.

 

[GRagland]

It is the gallery from gallery.sourceforge.com (yes it is legal to use it for commercial purposes). You can buy hosting/domain yourself and set up gallery, but you probably wont save much over my service (unless you know where to find good hosting deals like rossman). People who are willing, or have the technical knowhow, to set up gallery themselves on their own webspace, should probably do that. There are a lot of pay photo hosting services (such as pBase) which have a lot of customers. None of these services in my opinion are as cool as gallery.

I dont think any free or pay photo hosting service offers anywhere close to as many cool features, or is slick and easy to use. Thanks for your comments though, thats why I posted this here.

 

[yllus]

I think you're going to get few if any customers. There are just too many bigger, better competitors out there where a customer can be assured service will continue instead of taking a chance with you.

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: GRagland
You can buy hosting/domain yourself and set up gallery, but you probably wont save much over my service (unless you know where to find good hosting deals like rossman). People who are willing, or have the technical knowhow, to set up gallery themselves on their own webspace, should probably do that.

I disagree. The majority of AT'ers are geeks and can figure out how to register a domain, purchase a web hosting account, change DNS name servers and Installatron makes it easy installing a gallery script.

Even if they can't figure it out I'd be more than happy to help them out ... for free

Then again my idea of providing a service to the community differs from yours :evil:

 

[meltdown75]

pics.bbzzdd.com

is goot 4 mah PeeCee an 4 m3

 

[yllus]

Originally posted by: RossMAN

Originally posted by: GRagland
You can buy hosting/domain yourself and set up gallery, but you probably wont save much over my service (unless you know where to find good hosting deals like rossman). People who are willing, or have the technical knowhow, to set up gallery themselves on their own webspace, should probably do that.

I disagree. The majority of AT'ers are geeks and can figure out how to register a domain, purchase a web hosting account, change DNS name servers and Installatron makes it easy installing a gallery script.

Even if they can't figure it out I'd be more than happy to help them out ... for free

Then again my idea of providing a service to the community differs from yours :evil:

For lack of better wording, GRagland's potential customer is one who's ignorant of technology and online deals in general.

I have in fact looked into providing this exact same type of service and concluded that there was no potential in it. There's a serious logical flaw in the reasoning - you expect the person who is too ignorant to set up a gallery themselves to simultaneously be wooed by all of Gallery's technical features? Ha! They could not care less, because if they did read over that feature list they'd be the type of person who gets a personal domain and 1-click installs the script itself.

If you are going to press on with this anyways (and why not, there's little to lose now) I would suggest you market the fee as a yearly one, and keep it under $25. It's a lot easier to sell $25/year than it is to sell $2.50/month - who wants to be bothered by recurring fees that way? It also makes obvious business sense for you.

 

[SelArom]

anybody who thinks services aimed torwards noobs should take a look at the size of AOLs customer base...

but still it's hard to compete with free!

 

[Aharami]

i dont forsee this succeeding. but GL

 

[lizardboy]

Originally posted by: Aharami
i dont forsee this succeeding. but GL

 

[aplefka]

That's pretty mediocre at best.

To me, that's not even a lukewarm deal, it's practically frozen. Try something else.

 

[GRagland]

Well, at the very least I would like to make enought to cover my hosting costs so I can host my own gallery for free. If anyone here would like a gallery I will give them one for free for a couple weeks to try it out, and if after that if they want to pay I'll give them 500MB space for $25/year or 1GB of photo space for $50/year. How does that sound?

You can see my gallery at http://www.frontgallery.com/gallery2_31805/gallery2/

 

[Zim Hosein]

Originally posted by: GRagland
Well, at the very least I would like to make enought to cover my hosting costs so I can host my own gallery for free. If anyone here would like a gallery I will give them one for free for a couple weeks to try it out, and if after that if they want to pay I'll give them 500MB space for $25/year or 1GB of photo space for $50/year. How does that sound?

You can see my gallery at http://www.frontgallery.com/gallery2_31805/gallery2/

It sounds like I'm going w/ RossMAN's suggestion GRagland

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Define you want to target first, then it'll all make sense

What I can say is that you shouldn't target the online consumer, go local