Cloudinary, Imgix, Uploadcare (which I' working for) and others save you money because you don't have to develop and maintain these moving parts. You have to constantly check what's happening with browsers, what formats/encoders are available and which are the best etc.
It's classic build vs. buy dilemma. In majority of cases it's much more cost effective to buy.
BTW, Uploadcare doesn't charge for file processing at all, only for CDN traffic. So you can create as much image variants as you need.
I totally agree, but this was one of the requirements of the editor to have a "good marketable" headline. And we have to admit that this worked quite well.
On the other hand I feel that the article is very light and is indeed more for layman audience :) In depth one would be 10-15 times longer (and 100 times harder to write).
Curious - does that mean you serve close to 1.75 billion requests per day, out of which 350M are unique requests that exercise your stack instead of being served from a CDN. It'd be interesting to know more about what's the number of transformations you do at peak, if you can talk about it.
