How one developer built a free image comparison tool by eliminating egress costs

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A developer built imgi, a free tool that lets users compare two images side-by-side via a permanent shareable link, primarily used for before-and-after photo edits and AI upscales. The biggest challenge was not the technical slider feature but the bandwidth costs, since every viewer loading a comparison pulls down two full-resolution images, which can quickly add up to significant egress fees on platforms like AWS S3. The developer avoided these costs entirely by hosting images on Cloudflare R2, which charges zero dollars per gigabyte of outbound data, making the free-forever model financially sustainable. The full stack runs on Cloudflare's infrastructure, including Workers for edge-side rendering, D1 SQLite for metadata, and Workers Analytics Engine for privacy-friendly view tracking. The developer notes that many similar free image tools have shut down or added restrictions due to these hidden bandwidth costs, a fate they aimed to avoid by designing around zero-egress storage from the start.

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