As the Photobucket drama continues, we’re starting to more often see tweets and other such content criticizing those complaining about the changes Photobucket made last month. They virtually always seem to follow this same pattern of insulting those complaining, followed up by making the claim that the reason for the hatred is that people just don’t want to pay rather than actually listening to what the complaint is.
It’s not that Photobucket is charging – that certainly would be annoying, but on its own wouldn’t be enough to cause an issue – but instead is how much they are charging for hotlinking to be available – the $399 a year plan. That plan is the only way to use Phorobucket as an image hosting source directly – while the other plans provide more storage and the like, they don’t allow 3rd party hosing.
I’ve already explained in good enough detail why this is a problem: not everyone is going to pay this. Very few regular people can and will pay this. Only certain business are going this route, and the sad thing is they would still do better to buy their own hosting for a quarter the yearly price, if even that, and do all the hotlinking they want!
Photobucket Just Screwed Over The Blogging Community
Yeah, $400 isn’t chump change, and to say people are complaining about it having to pay and that’s it, then you just don’t get it. It shouldn’t be hard to explain this, either, but amazingly, people still don’t get it – that, or they just want to ignore it and use it as a way to attack people.
The Cost Of Photobucket Image Hosting
Anyway, to add insult to injury, there is a monthly payment plan being introduced for that Plus 500 plan, the top tier one which allows hotlinking. The price?
$59.99 A month.
So, the monthly cost over 12 months is even more than the yearly cost is upfront! Wait, what?
. @photobucket as part of your Elite Beta Group (lol) can I just say it SUCKS that your monthly payment for a $399/yr plan is $59? I’m done. pic.twitter.com/9XTZLTes4g
— Kate Gabrielle (@kategabrielle) July 27, 2017
I could understand if this was a monthly plan at 59, with an option for yearly and that 399 a year price was the “bonus / discounted” price, but this is the polar opposite – the monthly plan is coming after the fact!
The hilarious think is Photobucket advertises this as them listing to the users! What a load! Seriously, they aren’t listening to shit. Period.
http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?p=53654937
It would seem, as I said, that certain types of business users are paying these premiums – that’s their business (no pun intended), if they want to waste money they can go ahead, but still, I, and many others, consider this holding peoples digital data hostage – pay us and we will share it, or you can take it all, file by file, and move it somewhere else, taking up a ton of your time in the process!
http://watchintyme.com/showthread.php?45324-You-Spoke-We-Listened
It just ain’t right. Yeah, Photobucket can do what it wants to, but users will complain… and even non users, like me, will latch onto this until the story is over. I don’t have a pony in this race, so to speak, but it still seems absurd to me for Photobucket to have gone this route.