We're watching the cloud photo storage promise die in real-time, and the nerds are building lifeboats.
You know the playbook by now. Google Photos launched with unlimited free storage, got everyone hooked, then pulled the rug. Apple charges you monthly ransom for your own memories. Amazon Photos is fine until you realize you're locked into Prime forever. Every single cloud photo service follows the same arc: generous free tier, mass adoption, enshittification, price hikes, feature degradation. And now we're hitting the inflection point where technically-minded people are saying "enough" and spinning up their own infrastructure.
Enter the self-hosted photo management crowd, and specifically the Immich converts. These aren't hobbyists tinkering with Raspberry Pis for fun anymore. These are people who've done the math and realized that a $200 used mini PC and a 4TB drive costs less than three years of iCloud storage, with the bonus of actually owning their data. The "ridiculously robust" system isn't ridiculous at all when you consider the alternative is trusting Google not to sunset another product or Apple not to double prices again.
This is part of a larger pattern that should terrify Big Tech: the trust tax is coming due. We're three years into a wave of technical users who've watched Twitter become X, Netflix crack down on sharing, streaming services proliferate and fragment, and every "unlimited" cloud promise get walked back. The social contract of "give us your data and we'll make it easy" is breaking down because the "make it easy" part keeps getting worse while the "give us your data" part is permanent. Immich isn't just a photo app, it's a protest vote.
The uncomfortable truth is that cloud photo services were never really about serving customers, they were about data moats and ecosystem lock-in. Google wanted your photos to train AI and keep you in their ecosystem. Apple wanted recurring revenue and to make leaving iOS painful. The actual product experience was secondary. But they overplayed their hand. When you're charging someone $10/month to store photos they took, while simultaneously using those photos to train models you'll charge them to use, people start to notice the grift.
What's fascinating is how good the self-hosted tools have become. Immich has facial recognition, mobile apps, automatic backups, sharing, and a genuinely nice interface. It's not some command-line nightmare anymore. The gap between "Big Tech UX" and "open source alternative" has collapsed in categories where developers are personally angry. And nothing makes developers angrier than paying monthly fees for what should be a solved problem. Photo storage is just files and thumbnails, they're not putting a man on Mars.
The market implication here is that any category where the product is "store your stuff and don't screw it up" is vulnerable to the self-hosted rebellion. We've already seen it with Plex for media, Bitwarden for passwords, and Nextcloud for files. Photos are just the latest domino. The only defense is to actually provide value beyond storage, and most cloud services have forgotten how.
So when you see someone proudly documenting their "ridiculously robust" photo setup, don't laugh at the over-engineering. That's the sound of a customer relationship breaking permanently. They're not coming back when you launch some AI photo editing feature. They're gone, and they're telling their friends how to leave too.
