The situation
Somewhere to put photographs of your children is the one thing every free platform is happy to provide, and the photograph is the price. It becomes an ad segment, a ranking signal, or training data, and the family that shared it has no say in which. Famli is my own product, built and run on the opposite arrangement: the family pays, and the photos stay photos.
The hard part
Turning down that revenue means the family has to be the customer, and a subscription is a far smaller number than an ad network. Every feature has to survive that arithmetic. Transcoded video, face grouping, and a decade of full-resolution originals are costs that compound with each upload, while the monthly price stays exactly where it was — so the storage bill grows forever and the revenue per family does not. That constraint decides what ships.
What I built
- Invite-only albums
- A family reaches an album because someone invited them to it, and visibility is scoped per album rather than broadcast to everyone in the account.
- Video that survives the upload
- Clips are transcoded rather than recompressed into mush — the single clearest example of a feature the subscription pays for instead of an advertiser.
- Face grouping
- Photos are grouped by who is in them, so one child’s whole life comes back as a set rather than as ten years of scrolling.
- Family tree and timelines
- Relationships are recorded as a tree, and each member has a timeline — which is what makes the archive navigable by person rather than only by date.