Simple Photo Gallery started as an open-source project that people would self-host as a static website.
That approach is ridiculously powerful.
Because when a gallery is “just files” — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images — hosting it can be extremely cheap. Cheap enough that you can keep a collection online for years without thinking about it too much. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for about six years now: hosting my own galleries and leaving them online long-term.
But… self-hosting is not easy.
For non-technical people, “build a static website and host it somewhere” is somewhere between confusing and basically impossible. And once we started building the managed Simple Photo Gallery app — where we take care of hosting for you — we wanted to keep the best part of the open-source story: low-cost, long-term hosting that doesn’t feel like a trap. Because paying subscriptions forever for something you’re not actively using is just annoying. Sowe came up with a simple idea:
A 10-year hosting guarantee.
The idea
While you have an active subscription, everything works as you’d expect: You can create new galleries, edit existing ones, add photos, reorganize sections — all the “active” stuff. But if you decide to stop your subscription, we want to give you the option to keep your galleries online for another 10 years.
Which sounds a little crazy, right? How can we afford to host someone’s photos for a decade after they stop paying?
The trick: static galleries are cheap
The key is that the galleries are static. They’re generated once, and then served as static files. That’s way cheaper than hosting a dynamic application that needs servers, databases, background jobs… all the stuff that costs money every month whether someone visits your gallery or not.
Static hosting has a very different cost profile. And it opens up options.
How it works behind the scenes
In our regular setup, we host gallery files on Cloudflare R2. When a gallery transitions into the “guarantee period”, we do two things:
First, we move it to a cheaper CDN service called Backblaze B2. It’s still fast, but the price is lower — around $0.006 per GB per month compared to $0.015 per GB per month for Cloudflare R2.
Second, we optimize the photos a bit. If someone uploads huge JPEGs, we convert them into high-resolution AVIF files. Realistically, most people won’t see a difference — they’ll just see the images — but the file size difference can be massive.
So the links to your galleries stay alive for a decade.
Pricing: a small premium for a long runway
The guarantee is an optional add-on. You pay a small premium on top of the yearly plan — 20% or more. So for example, if the basic plan is $50/year, you’d pay $60 instead of $50.
That gets you:
- 1 year of active subscription (create/edit/add photos)
- plus 10 more years where your existing galleries stay online
In other words… you can pay $60 for one year, cancel immediately, and still keep your galleries available for 11 years. That’s the kind of deal I personally would want.
Why not 100 years?
Funny enough, the first idea was a 100-year guarantee.
And I still think it’s possible. Maybe we’ll get there. But in the beginning it felt too unrealistic to promise. I mean… I won’t be alive in 100 years.
Although I do have two sons, so technically they could take over and keep paying. Not sure how they’ll feel about that, but we’ll see.
So for now, it’s 10 years.
The goal
The goal is simple:
Give people the ease of a managed app without locking them into “pay forever or lose your photos.” With some smart technology choices, we can offer something unusually good — without breaking the bank.
If this sounds like what you’ve always wanted from photo sharing… go check it out.