Kraken.io

Web and SaaS

image optimization service

SHOW HN2013

93points
59comments
#248of 1,739 in 2013
Top 15%of 2013 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

6 positive, 17 neutral or asking, 6 mixed, 12 critical, out of 41 comments about the project. Thread score -0.07.

Performance: 1 for, 5 againstIdea: 2 for, 3 againstExecution: 1 for, 3 againstPricing: 1 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Clean, polished website and design

    From 3 comments
    • The website looks extremely professional, very well done.
      stephanos2k on HN
    • My quick 5 minute review of this site is: nice work. The design and feel of the site itself is very polished and professional. I threw a handful of "optimized" images at it, and…
      JeremyMorgan on HN
    • Nice site. I found 5% savings on about 40kb. Every little helps. It's fantastic that you've made a free web interface, but it would be great if we could enter a URL and it would…
      deanclatworthy on HN
  • Fast, easy upload and real-time savings progress

    From 2 comments
    • Very nicely done, kraken-io! Just threw over 500 images at it (mainly PNGs, but a few JPGs and GIFs as well), virtually all of which I had optimized beforehand. For the PNGs, I…
      miles on HN
    • I am very impressed with the website design and the well thought through and fast user interface. It seemed to be able to gain around 5% in average. This is not useful for me…
      kken on HN
  • Useful for reducing image sizes on web pages

    From 1 comment
    • Excellent news! I work for a very large publisher in Canada that uses WordPress as its CMS of choice. Because we use Akamai and shrug at bandwidth costs, I don't have much of an…
      yllus on HN

Objections

  • Per-image pricing is unfavourable for large or varied image counts

    From 3 comments
    • I like it. I had the same idea - not that it's a difficult idea to have. Well executed. However, I have some criticism. > We like to think the only way to get your image files…
      pdknsk on HN
    • My quick 5 minute review of this site is: nice work. The design and feel of the site itself is very polished and professional. I threw a handful of "optimized" images at it, and…
      JeremyMorgan on HN
    • I'd love to see a pay as you go option. I run a SaaS where the user can select a profile picture, however, we usually get users with 100-150 at a time, then maybe nothing for a…
      oellegaard on HN
  • 8MB max file size is too small

    From 2 comments
    • Very nice website and service, only thing I found an issue with was the max file size - 8MB. This is very small. Imagine if someone wanted to take a bunch of photos straight out…
      thejosh on HN
    • I'm building a service right now that is a community site for people in the fashion photography (photographers/models/etc) world. The images that these people upload are…
      bradleyjoyce on HN
  • Savings are small compared to local free tools

    From 3 comments
    • > For the PNGs, I had used 4 different optimizers (PNGCrush, OptiPNG, AdvPNG, and PNGOut), but almost all images saw size reductions in lossless mode ranging from under 1% to…
      rorrr2 on HN
    • And don't have to transmit your images over the net.. and.. and... Frankly, I don't understand how anyone would want to pay USD 250 per year to get a service which albeit behind…
      radiospiel on HN
    • Well, there's where the problem is. I want to do a clean build on each deploy, and there will be many devs on many machines building it, so handling it locally isn't really…
      pbiggar on HN
  • Metadata stripping removes copyright info and colour profiles

    From 2 comments
    • I really like the service but PLEASE please do not strip all metadata out of photos uploaded by your users. Stripping out the EXIF/IPTC copyright information creates an orphan…
      hopeless on HN
    • I tried quickly with a PNG screenshot, and found that the result was bigger than what ImageOptim could do. It seems to me that you're not stripping color profile information, you…
      agos on HN
  • Testimonials look fake

    From 1 comment
    • I like it. I had the same idea - not that it's a difficult idea to have. Well executed. However, I have some criticism. > We like to think the only way to get your image files…
      pdknsk on HN

Requests

  • WordPress plugin

    From 3 comments
    • 1. How does it compare to JPEGmini? 2. You need a (good) Wordpress plugin.
      Sujan on HN
    • I second the WordPress plugin idea - I've got a few clients I'd sign up (probably only on the micro 500/month sized plan).
      bigiain on HN
    • We are developing our official WP plugin at the moment. We are bound to have something to show in the 1-2 weeks from now.
      kraken-io on HN
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing

    From 1 comment
    • I'd love to see a pay as you go option. I run a SaaS where the user can select a profile picture, however, we usually get users with 100-150 at a time, then maybe nothing for a…
      oellegaard on HN
  • Larger file size limit

    From 2 comments
    • Very nice website and service, only thing I found an issue with was the max file size - 8MB. This is very small. Imagine if someone wanted to take a bunch of photos straight out…
      thejosh on HN
    • I'm building a service right now that is a community site for people in the fashion photography (photographers/models/etc) world. The images that these people upload are…
      bradleyjoyce on HN
  • Caching for automated build pipelines

    From 1 comment
    • This looks great! How would I use this as part of an asset pipeline? If I'm running it as part of an automated process, I'd love to see prices that support that model, as well as…
      pbiggar on HN
  • Downloadable local app

    From 1 comment
    • Thanks for the reply. As someone being into photography I would like to have the functionality that kraken provides on my local machine; even saving 10% on my huge pile of…
      radiospiel on HN

Questions

  • How does it compare to JPEGmini and TinyPNG?

    From 2 comments
    • What would be the difference from tools like http://tinypng.org and http://www.jpegmini.com/main/shrink_photo ?
      mva on HN
    • 1. How does it compare to JPEGmini? 2. You need a (good) Wordpress plugin.
      Sujan on HN
  • Is PCI DSS compliance verified?

    From 2 comments
    • Do you have PCI DSS certification ? The credit card number is going through your servers.
      prattbhatt on HN
    • How does wirecard verify your PCI DSS? It's usually a SAQ and pen scans.
      Uchikoma on HN
  • Could large uploads be used for denial of service?

    From 2 comments
    • Just had a thought. If I generate 8MB PNG files with noise in them and upload 1000 of such files, your servers will choke. Maybe you should charge per MB.
      rorrr2 on HN
    • No, I mean it can be used to DoS you. Give it a try. Optimizing even one 8MB noise PNG is a huge amount of CPU work.
      rorrr2 on HN

Alternatives named

  • ImageOptim

    From 1 comment
    • http://imageoptim.com/ Similarly you can get some pretty good optimisations with the local, and open source OSX app, which is itself just a frontend for free linux utilities.
      nwh on HN
  • JPEGmini

    From 2 comments
    • What would be the difference from tools like http://tinypng.org and http://www.jpegmini.com/main/shrink_photo ?
      mva on HN
    • Exactly what I was thinking. JPEGmini works better in my tests.
      wijnglas on HN
  • TinyPNG

    From 1 comment
    • What would be the difference from tools like http://tinypng.org and http://www.jpegmini.com/main/shrink_photo ?
      mva on HN
  • Smushit

    From 1 comment
    • Surprised no one has mentioned Yahoo!'s smushit.com service yet. It even works nearly identically (minus the API). Kraken seems to do a tad better in the handful of images I…
      chrismeller on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

Add a badge to your READMEShown on HackerShow
[![Shown on HackerShow](https://hackershow.org/badge.svg)](https://hackershow.org/show/6194337)