9mo ago

What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?

www.creativebloq.com What is Cara, the Instagram alternative that gained 600k users in a week?

Everything you need to know about the AI-free social media platform for artists.

Key points:

Cara's Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
Cara's Features: The app is designed specifically for artists and offers a 'Portfolio' feature. Users can tag fields, mediums, project types, categories, and software used to create their work
While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram's massive user base of two billion.
Glaze Integration: Cara is working on integrating Glaze directly in the app to provide users with an easy way to protect their work from be used by any AI

more about: https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about

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114 comments

So what happend when this app needs to pay server costs for 600,000 people?
- Funny you should mention that.
  
  Re: the hosting company
  Your account does not appear to have spend management enabled, which would allow you to pause your project entirely if you hit a certain level of spend.
  So, this is something of a devil's bargain. Either shut down your website just as it's catching fire and gaining traction. Or get billed a year's server budget in a matter of days because of exploding costs.
  In a saner world, this might be used as an argument for treating the Internet as a public utility and not a for-profit rent. Perhaps more companies could grow and sustain large pools of customers if they weren't kneecapped by their own momentum.
  Instead, I'm sure we're going to see more exotic insurance and finance services designed to siphon money out of websites as a hedge against unexpected growth.
  
  Do you mind telling what this says ? it seems Firefox doesn't load twitter anymore. Or maybe you need an account ? I'm not sure, but it says "error"
  
  "Jingna Zhang @ cara.app/zemotion @zemotion So freaking speechless right now. Seen many @vercel functions stories but first time experiencing such discrepancy vs request logs like, this is cannot be real??"
  
  I've heard from many ppl that vercel is pretty nasty that way, and to only use them for learning and toy projects.
  
  Twitter no longer loads newer tweets if you're logged out. Instead of showing a proper message, it either fails to load or redirects to the login page. They did that to prevent scraping.
  
  So what happens now? I doubt they have figured monetization right?
  
  They basically have to just move off vercel. There's a lot of other much cheaper alternatives though
  
  OK, but they have a 90k bill now?
  
  Can probably be massaged a bit
  
  Massaging costs extra though?

114 comments