We're increasing our upload limits to make our service more accessible to developers building high-traffic and viral web apps.
Why increase the limits?
Since we launched in 2021, we've learned a lot about our customers.
As time passed, we started to realize that our monthly upload limits have been set too low.
Here's why: the limit's primary function has been to encourage plan upgrades – or rather – to help us differentiate between large business users that can afford a higher plan (and are happy to pay) vs. low-budget customers like startups and individual developers, who can't afford enterprise prices. The problem is, we've learned that monthly file uploads do not correlate with the customer's budget. For example, a large law firm may be happy to pay $500/mo for 1000 uploads/mo, whereas an individual may only be able to afford $7/mo for 10,000 uploads/mo. Clearly, uploads don't correlate with the customer's budget.
The upload limit started creating its own problems: not only was the limit not serving its original purpose, but it was causing prospects to walk away, and we often found ourselves overriding it for our own Bytescale account, which we use to power our sandbox environment. In a sense, it was causing us to fail the dogfood test.
The final straw: today saw the launch of Scribble Diffusion – a microsite demonstrating Replicate's impressive AI models – developed by Zeke Sikelianos. (Check it out if you haven't already.) The project went viral but was on the Bytescale Basic Plan, so quickly ran into problems when it exceeded its upload limit of 2,500, with little warning due to the 80% reminder email being sent out at the 2000 mark. 500 uploads went by in a flash, and the site stopped working:
Sorry about that. We briefly hit our @UploadHQ plan's limit, but we've upgraded. Can you try again?
— Zeke Sikelianos (@zeke) February 17, 2023
Today we're taking steps to prevent this from happening again:
The first step we're taking is to significantly increase monthly file upload limits.
This means users will receive a lot more notice prior to hitting their account's upload limit.
For example, Basic Plan users will now receive a monthly upload limit of 20,000 meaning they will receive a notification at 16,000 giving them (hopefully) plenty of time to react.
There's more we can do to ensure incidents like the above never happen again, but this is a positive step in the right direction.
What are the new upload limits?
From today, the number of files you can upload per month will be as follows:
| Plan | Previous (Uploads per Month) | Current (Uploads per Month) |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Plan | 2,500 | 20,000 |
| Plus Plan | 25,000 | 100,000 |
| Advanced Plan | 150,000 | 500,000 |
