As I loaded up Flickr the other day, I was thinking about how much money I’m spending on near-useless internet stuff. The pro account in Flickr is only marginally worth it, though now that I’m well past 200 photos I needed to spend the money so my initial uploadings didn’t disappear. It’s kind of like the mob, if you think about it that way…

On that note, I started to wonder if there was some way to have the benefits of Flickr pro (unlimited photos) without having to pay the full $25. I figure that the brunt of the cost is for a) hosting and b) bandwidth, and I wonder if Flickr could remain profitable by offering a third choice between the free and pro accounts. It could allow people with decent hosting (like me) to upload their photos to Flickr’s service still, but instead of living on Flickr’s servers they would live on the user’s, leaving us with only one hosting/bandwidth bill instead of two.

There are only two potential issues that I’m aware of. I could see Yahoo! being concerned at the loss of too many Flickr pro customers, and I don’t know how valid that is. It depends on what kind of hosting they have set up on the side, if any. The other concern is how much bandwidth my photos actually use on a monthly basis. I can’t imagine it’s a ton, judging by the number of views that are recorded, but who knows. That’s one argument to remain a full-on pro user for some of the more popular people.

I have second thoughts about this idea already, and I know that part of me is just wanting to stop spending so much damn money. Is this a valid idea?