Since I can’t figure it out (yet?), free accounts have ads and Pro don’t. As long as I’m running the show, that will remain true.

Alas, Flickr wouldn't even be alive if we hadn't increased the price ($$) and value (features) of Pro relative to things like intrusive ads on free accounts, etc. The very reason it's alive is because we have intrusive ads on free accounts, but no ads on Pro accounts, including for viewers. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.

We have some great plans to further increase Pro's value, but we disagree that Pro is too expensive. Relative to our peers, it's a bargain for unlimited storage, advertising free, etc etc.

Love to bounce future ideas off of you, and thanks for the article!

You make a fair point about the age verification thing. I'll look into it. It's probably based on a legal requirement that we have to deal with, even if the solution is silly. Sorry about that.

Not everything is allowed, though - here's the list: https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/20529310987796-...

We do have real, human, in-house customer support. It's good and fast.

As I think the article captured pretty well, we could make a lot more money if we went the algorithmic-privacy-violating route, but we don't want to. So we aren't.

Since we never raised a round of funding, as long as the bills are getting paid, we can do what we want - build a company for the long-term based on a great photography community. So that's what we're doing. :)

We have lots of work to do, and I think most of the criticisms are fair and on our road map. Small team, working hard, listening to customers. Like we've been doing for 24 years. (We're bootstrapped and privately owned, never taken VC).

AMA.

But I can't find anything to support the use case for highly available (multi-AZ), scalable, production infrastructure. Specifically, a unified and consistent cache across geos (AZs in the AWS case, since this seems to be targeted at S3).

Without it, you're increasing costs somewhere in your organization - cross-AZ networking costs, increased cache sizes in each AZ to be available, increased compute and cache coherency costs across AZs to ensure the caches are always in sync, etc etc.

Any insight from the authors on how they handle these issue on their production systems at scale?