Have you been hit by the Shutterstock / Giphy shakedown yet? We'd love to know. #2
Description
I say yet because it feels inevitable—they're coming for us all.
When we signed up in early 2023 there was no mention of costs. Even today there's not. Fast forward a year, and we received a message from a Sales Specialist to discuss "important company updates that will directly impact your integration". During a call they tried to pitch us on new features that were coming soon™.
Clearly reaching and trying to justify what was coming next: based on our usage and features currently implemented, GIPHY Pro Premium (emojis, stickers, and GIFs) would cost us $11,999 for the next 12 months. If we opted for GIPHY Pro (only GIFs) it would be $8,999.
And the kicker?
"We ask partners to work within a 30-day timeline from today."
Right.
So what did we do? We started searching for alternatives. Since we already rely heavily on Google APIs, we decided to check out Tenor. The downside? The Tenor packages in the Dart and Flutter ecosystem weren't very well maintained. With that in mind we decided to pivot our current Giphy integration into what you see today:
- Tenor Dart: A client wired up to talk directly to the Tenor API via HTTP. This will allow you to build your own UI around Tenor.
- Tenor Flutter: An opinionated off the shelf UI that allows you to search GIFs, Stickers and Emoji from Tenor with very little work required. You can also customize the tabs to do whatever you want really.
Check out this Reddit post for other people affected by this shakedown.
There is still some work ahead of us on these packages. But it's a starting point and we are committed to making it the best we can because... well, we use it in our apps!