This "Simple" Image Compression SaaS Makes $50,000 Monthly
How Alex turned an experiment into a full-fledged profitable SaaS business
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Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hello! I’m Alex Florescu the Head of Product at ShortPixel.
I live in Bucharest, Romania, and I’ve been playing around with computers since I can remember. I studied computer science and have spent the last 20 years building things online.
These days, I lead product development at ShortPixel, and I still get excited about making the web faster and better.
ShortPixel is an image optimization service that helps websites load faster by compressing images without losing quality.
It’s used by over a million websites and has become a go-to tool for WordPress users looking to improve performance and SEO.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
The idea for ShortPixel started almost by accident.
Back in 2012, I was running a profitable screenshot service. It worked well and left me with some free time and extra server capacity.
So, as a passionate programmer I decided to experiment. I built an image optimization API, it was fast and efficient, but way too technical for most users. That’s when I realized the people who really needed it were on WordPress, and they needed a simple plugin, not just an API.
So we built the first version of the ShortPixel WordPress plugin in just a few weeks. It was simple, functional, and free at first. We didn’t invest a lot of money, just time and the servers we already had. The real cost was the commitment to keep improving it based on user feedback.
Once we saw that people were actually using it and coming back, we knew we had something worth pursuing seriously.
How did you get your first initial customers?
In the beginning, we kept it simple.
We launched the ShortPixel plugin on WordPress.org (on 1st of April from all the days!), and that’s where our first users came from.
The space was still quite open back then, there weren’t many solid image optimization tools for WordPress, so people found us organically while searching for a solution.
We didn’t do any paid marketing. Instead, we focused on listening closely to feedback, improving the product, and making it as simple and effective as possible. That helped build trust and retention.
Once we saw traction, we started reaching out to developers of related plugins to explore collaborations. Those early partnerships helped us reach new users who already cared about performance.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
Over time, our strategy evolved.
We still rely heavily on WordPress.org for organic reach, but we’ve doubled down on a few channels that worked really well for us.
Our affiliate program has been a key driver of long-term growth, consistently bringing in high-quality users.
We also ran a deal campaign on AppSumo, which helped us onboard over 10,000 customers and expand our visibility in the ecosystem. We experimented with paid ads, but the ROI wasn’t great, so we chose to focus more on product-led growth, partnerships, and community engagement.
We use tools like F5Bot to track mentions of us and our competitors on platforms like Reddit or forums, so we can jump into relevant conversations and better understand user needs. Today, we promote through a mix of affiliates, plugin ecosystem visibility, partnerships, and occasional email updates that keep our users engaged and informed.
And of course, we “promote” the plugins by offering the best image compression algorithms and making sure the plugins are continuously developed and updated.
How does your business make money?
Our business model is freemium.
Users can start for free, and when they need more, they can either purchase one-time credit packages or choose a subscription plan. Most of our users are WordPress site owners and agencies, although we also offer access via API and web tools. In the beginning, we overcomplicated our pricing with different limits and packages.
Over time, we learned that simplicity works better—for us and for our customers. We moved to flat-fee, unlimited plans, which turned out to be not just easier to manage, but also more profitable.
Looking ahead, we’re continuing to improve the value of our current plans, while also investing in FastPixel, our WordPress speed optimization and caching plugin. There’s room to grow there, especially by offering better performance tools that are still easy to use.
Right now, ShortPixel generates around $50,000 in monthly revenue, while our second product, FastPixel, brings in about $5,000 per month.
We’re a team of 10 people, and we operate a high-performance infrastructure of over 40 servers.
Running an image optimization service at scale is expensive, processing millions of images daily requires serious computational resources. But we’ve focused a lot on efficiency and scalability, which helps us keep costs under control while maintaining 99.9% uptime.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your business?
Thanks for reading!
You can learn more about what we’re building at ShortPixel and FastPixel. If you’re into web performance, WordPress, or just want your site to load faster, feel free to check them out. We’re always listening to feedback and improving based on what users need.