Hey Aubrey,

Appreciate the thoughts.

I've got a post coming out soon which details why we use services like Heroku and Imgix to outsource a lot of our core services. TLDR: devops + a IaaS (like AWS) is more expensive and difficult to ship quickly based on our team and product (may not be true for all startups). Heroku, for example, gives us review apps, a deploy pipeline, simple scaling, easy configuration, security patches, backups, etc. all out of the box for every one of our projects and services. It's so simple that our frontends and designers make infrastructure changes.

We don't advertise because none of the current opportunities are worth it vs the experience they provide for users. We very much have plans to monetize in the future and believe me, we think about it a lot, but we're committed to doing it in a way that preserves the experience of the site, what makes sense for our community and the amazing photographers, and gives us the best shot at building something truly unique in the long-run.

We are funded by investors and we currently provide referrals to our parent company Crew. Unsplash is not going away :)