Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The marketing says that this is an Alternative to Imgur, but the product doesn't feel like an alternative to Imgur, it feels like an alternative to OneDrive. It shares more features with Gyazo, the other product you compare it to, but I don't see it being a solid upsell.

Is marketed to Imgur users as a better alternative for broadly sharing memes on the Internet, and if so why is privacy and encryption important? Couldn't privacy be a limiting factor, since Imgur is first and foremost a social network? Wouldn't the limited space of the free plan be a dealbreaker for someone happily using Imgur in an unlimited capacity for free?

Is it marketed to business users that actually prioritize privacy, and if so, aren't you worried that comparing it to a Social Network like Imgur would betray the privacy angle? Where are the enterprise options that allow me to onboard people with SSO/MFA and protect sensitive files from people outside of the organization? There are too many security holes in this product to trust it for business use, especially copying the full URL to every shared object to the clipboard where it can be accessed with anyone with the URL...

If someone actually wanted to use this service to store and share large files, you only offer 100GB for $5/month, and limit file sizes to 10GB. For $2/month you can get 100GB on Google Drive with roughly the same capabilities, and for $10 you can get 2TB on Google Drive or MEGA, with the latter being encrypted by default. $10 from Office 365 gets you 6TB of cloud storage with sharing capabilities. The pricing for Horizon storage is outrageous by comparison to every competitor's offerings.

Furthermore, you have to read through the pricing page to discover that encryption at-rest isn't default, and you have to turn it on for files you want encrypted, and it doesn't even tell you what kind of encryption or how the recipient decrypts it. Alternatives like MEGA still have you beat in that regard.




You're comparing Horizon to cloud storage services, which I think is unfair. Horizon is focused on the sharing aspect. Uploading to Google Drive and OneDrive is not as effortless as Horizon and won't provide the same frictionless viewing experience for whoever you share the links to.

Horizon is actually cheaper than alternatives, including Gyazo and Streamable, as said in another person's comment.

Global encryption is enabled at rest for every file, but with a key that I control. Toggling the Encryption feature (capital E to distinguish the feature name), encrypts the file again with a key not stored by Horizon. This info can be found in the help center.


>You're comparing Horizon to cloud storage services, which I think is unfair. Horizon is focused on the sharing aspect.

I think the closest competitor you have is MEGA, and they are not a Cloud Storage service, they are a File Hosting service like Horizon is. There is plenty of overlap between the offerings of Cloud Storage and File Hosting services, but if sharing files with others is a central feature, the service is generally understood to be a File Hosting service, and that would definitely include services like OneDrive and Google Drive too.

>Uploading to Google Drive and OneDrive is not as effortless as Horizon

How specifically is it easier? Create an account, upload files, optionally with a client. API for uploading programatically. Sharable URLs for giving access to others. It seems fundamentally equal to other platforms in ease-of-use.

>Horizon is actually cheaper than alternatives, including Gyazo and Streamable

Gyazo's entry tier costs the same as your's, and also offers an Enterprise tier with SSO/MFA that is going to be a operational requirement of any business customer that cares about privacy and security.

Streamable's entry tier may cost twice as much ($10/month), but it comes with 5x the storage (critical if you're sharing 4K HDR video), and the guarantee of a highly available CDN. It is marketed towards a specific need, instead of the broad social/business product you have created, which is superfluous to anyone who just needs reliable video hosting.

>Global encryption is enabled at rest for every file, but with a key that I control.

As good as unencrypted if this key is hot and used to decrypt all files shared without user encryption.


Gyazo does not cost the same. You're comparing monthly prices *billed annually* to Horizon's month to month term, which is an unfair comparison. Horizon is $3.75 a month billed annually, while Gyazo is $4.99.


Gyazo offers actual security features though.

Regardless, I will note that you could not answer the questions I asked about your product.


> You're comparing Horizon to cloud storage services, which I think is unfair. Horizon is focused on the sharing aspect. Uploading to Google Drive and OneDrive is not as effortless as Horizon and won't provide the same frictionless viewing experience for whoever you share the links to.

Yeah...

It's nice that you get a business opportunity out of this, but one of my first thoughts was how easy it used to be to host images on Dropbox. But they made it bad, and the other big syncing services have the same bad experience. They clearly don't want to be image hosts.


Not even Open AI, which arguably has the resources to programmatically "look" at images and know if they are okay, wants to do image hosting. That should give you pause. What do their lawyers know that you don't?


I'm not sure why OpenAI would. They're an AI research company. You're confusing scope with their legal team's considerations.


Why would they want to?

Also these services still make it easy to share a folder of images, they just make embedded uses a pain.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: