When does Uploadcare make sense compared to custom upload solutions, especially with a discount?
We’ve been running our own upload flow for a while using S3 and some backend logic, and it worked fine at the start. But as the app grew, we started dealing with retries, broken uploads on mobile, slow image previews, and random edge cases that took way too much time to debug. Now I’m debating whether it’s smarter to keep patching our custom setup or move to something like Uploadcare, especially since there’s a discount right now. Curious when people feel the switch actually pays off and isn’t just overkill.
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From my experience, custom solutions are okay until uploads become core to the product. We hit that point with a marketplace app where users constantly uploaded images and documents. Maintaining our own pipeline started eating sprint time. Moving to Uploadcare simplified a lot: uploads were more reliable, transformations were just URLs, and CDN delivery was baked in. With the current Uploadcare deal, the cost difference versus running and maintaining infra felt way smaller. It made sense once we factored in developer time and fewer support tickets, not just raw hosting costs.