A pay-as-you-go community image host.
Free image hosting services are inevitably transient. Many have risen and fallen since the Internet started. They start, grow, overreach, run out of money, try to pack in more ads, and then die, taking all their images with them. Rinse and repeat.
What if instead image hosting could be paid for by anyone who actually wanted the image to stay around? That's the idea behind Linkrot: once an image is put online, it has a known expiration date, and anyone can toss a little bit of money into the pot to keep that image around longer. Images aren't owned by a single user, once they're put online anyone with a link to them can help keep them there. Remote linking stops being a problem and instead becomes desirable. Once something is put on the internet, it's there as long as people still want it there.
Use cases could be:
- Store and share personal images - only people with a direct link can see them.
- Community image host for a forum, Discord server or some other venue.
- Host images for a static website - only pay for what you use.
- Whatever else you can come up with!
This site is currently in open beta, to collect load info and bug reports. There is no real payment processing, you can give yourself as many tokens as you wish. The full paid site will hopefully be running early 2024.
Pricing
All prices are in "tokens", 100 tokens = 1 USD. The current price to host a 1 megabyte image is: ~0.3 tokens/mo.
Prices are recalculated once per month based off the real costs of storing and serving images.
How it works
Upload an image
Images are hosted for 30 days free of charge.
Make an account and put money into images
This will extend the amount of time the image is kept available.
Share it wherever you want!
The purpose of Linkrot is to host images for other sites to link to. By default, a small banner is inserted into the image asking for donations to keep the image online, but you can always link to a "clean" version without the banner if you want to -- the link to it is on the image's info page.
