Aviary Now Free As A Bird

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Aviary is easily one of the best online image editors out there — maybe the best. But to take full advantage of all it offers, you had to pay for its full suite, which cost you $24.99 a year. Well, that is until now. Starting today, the full service is now available for free to all users.

While there has always been a free version of the service, you could not do some of the more advanced things without this subscription. But now you get access to things such as saving private files on Aviary’s servers, adding your own watermarks or go watermark-free, and access to all of their nice tutorials.

So why go free? Well, Aviary always wanted the product to be free, but they previously couldn’t justify it. But now, “our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way,” co-founder Michael Galpert tells us. He goes on to note that the focus is on building an app marketplace where people can buy and sell goods and services which Aviary would take a cut of. So really, this is a shift in strategy to a new type of model.

Existing paying customers will no longer be billed, and those that signed up in the last 30 days will get a full refund.

Aviary competes with Adobe’s online version of Photoshop which is also free, but requires you to pay if you go over their 2GB limit.

Company: Aviary
Website: aviary.com
Launch Date: 2007
Funding: $17M

Aviary’s mission is to power the world’s creativity. Aviary provides developers with a robust, customizable photo editor that can be plugged into consumer-facing apps on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and HTML5 in minutes. Hassle-free integration: easy to integrate with just a few lines of code. Customizable: The look and feel of the photo editor can be changed to match the brand. Cross-platform: Aviary SDKs are available for all major mobile platforms and HTML5. Easy to use: Anyone can pick up on the intuitive editing...

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