Why We Built imge

AI has made it remarkably easy for teams to generate visuals, run ad campaigns, and ship entire web products. But as creation gets easier, one thing quietly gets harder: managing all those assets.

Most startups begin with a handful of simple images. But as they grow, and as hit counts and server requests increase, a real solution for hosting and serving media becomes unavoidable.

Podcast episodes. Marketing videos. Blog post images. Open graph assets. Files accumulated across Figma, Notion, Slack, and every other tool we touched. At some point, the sheer volume of assets became a problem of its own.

The result? We found ourselves paying north of $50/month to media hosting companies like Cloudinary ($600+ a year) just to serve our own files from someone else's servers. For an early-stage startup, that's not a rounding error. That's a recurring tax on momentum.

What we set out to build

imge is our answer. Three goals, no compromises:

1. 1

   A simple, minimal, self-hosted Cloudinary alternative. No lock-in. No surprise bills. No telemetry. Your assets live on your infrastructure, served by your rules. Deploy in minutes and own it completely.

2. 2

   A playground for your own AI models. AI is moving fast and your media pipeline should move with it. imge is designed to be extensible: hook in your own models for smart cropping, background removal, upscaling, or anything else you can imagine.

3. 3

   A media distribution layer built for builders. Technical founders and developers shouldn't have to wrestle with media infrastructure. imge is built to be deployed in a single command and operated without a dedicated DevOps team.

The larger picture

The world is generating more media than ever, and that trend is only accelerating. Most of that media ends up scattered across paid platforms that charge for the privilege of accessing your own files. We think that's backwards.

Self-hosting used to mean weeks of setup, complex infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance headaches. It doesn't anymore. imge is our proof of that.

If you've ever looked at your Cloudinary bill and thought "there has to be a better way", there is. Go deploy it.