Moved from SmugMug again

I seem to have this rich history of flipping between paid and free plans/services for my websites– in particular, my photography website: sunpechphotography.com.

I used ChatGPT to help me create the image above.

To SmugMug (2012 and 2013) #

I first became a SmugMug customer in 2012. But then they raised their prices after 7 years, and I quickly asked for a refund. However, in 2013, I went back to being a customer again. I think I did so after I realized that I may have left my domain empty for an entire year.

Back to Free (2014) #

A year later, I blogged about leaving SmugMug and building my own photography site. Back then, I built it with Ruby on Rails, Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Twitter Bootstrap, and Font Awesome. This was using all free plans/services. This held for five years, from 2014 to 2019.

Back to SmugMug (2019) #

Five years later, I’m back at SmugMug again because I wanted to upload large libraries of photos, and the free Heroku+Postgres plans wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. Side note, this was a few years before Heroku announced their next chapter (August 25, 2022), where they discontinued their free product plans.

Here’s what Sunpech Photography looked like on Smugmug:

It looks pretty decent and served up thousands of my photos in an organized manner very well.

Back to Free (2025) #

Today again, I’m once again leaving SmugMug, after being their customer for six years from 2019-2025. They keep increasing their prices to the point where I didn’t think it was worth it anymore.

I rebuilt my photography website with Hugo and host it on Cloudflare Pages. The photography site is a static website of roughly 18,000 files, and recreated with a similar homepage. I am using the hugo-theme-gallery theme. I even did some vibe coding and asked ChatGPT to generate some javascript for me.

I recently started using Cloudflare Pages. Traditionally, I’ve been using Netlify for my static websites. I do wish Cloudflare had free support for webhooks into Discord for notifications. Netlify does it for free.

Final Thoughts #

I’m not hating on SmugMug or anything.

The situation was that I needed less from them over time, and they kept raising prices. It was not a good match. Plus I really felt that I could achieve something similar using free services and save myself a bit of money.

SmugMug bought Flickr in 2018 and made a limit of 1,000 photos/videos for free Flickr accounts. But my Flickr still has all the photos I uploaded, depsite being over the free limit. They never deleted anything (yet)! In recent years, I have been disappointed in a lot of things photography related, so if they do delete them, I’d be bummed, but get by. Everyone needs to do what’s right for them.

Will the free services come to an end on Github and Cloudflare? Hopefully not! But if so, I’ll be ready to pivot.

Please visit: sunpechphotography.com