For about two months last year I had a habit: check the API usage graph before anything else in the morning. Not because traffic was flattering — because every time that line went up I had to work out how much credit was left. Image processing on my site ran entirely through a third-party API, billed per call.
Some background. I run a small tool site: users upload an image, something happens to it, they download it. Compression, format conversion, background removal — all third-party APIs, a few cents to a few tens of cents per operation. Cheap in isolation. The problem is it's welded to usage, and the more people use it the more I pay, on a site that's free. When a referral sent me a modest amount of traffic, my first reaction wasn't delight, it was opening a calculator. Background removal was the expensive one — an AI endpoint priced an order of magnitude above ordinary operations — and there was a month where that single feature accounted for more than half my server costs.
After moving it
I moved everything movable into users' browsers, using ImgIng. Strictly speaking I didn't integrate it; I put a link on the site and let people process things themselves, keeping only the business flow on my side. Lazy, but for one person it's the least work. What moved: compression, format conversion, AI background removal, the animation workshop, multilingual OCR. It later added an image editor, AI upscaling and the whole PDF side — compression, PDF to image, extracting embedded originals, content extraction, HTML both directions — plus DOCX and PPTX to offline HTML, and I hung those off the site too.
