A photography studio cut $11,040 a year in cloud fees and shot 40 more sessions

The challenge

The studio's storage situation had two problems, and neither was visible until it was too late to pretend it was fine.

The first: every file lived in one place. One cloud account, one point of failure. No local copy. They had never lost data, but were one account suspension or billing failure away from losing years of work.

The second showed up daily. Photographers editing simultaneously both needed files from the cloud. That meant syncing before editing could start. On tight deadlines the wait compounded. Their editing speed depended on the connection to cloud storage, not the computers on their desks. And it got slower as the archive grew.

A third cost ran quietly in the background: $120 a month to a gallery platform for client delivery. Files they had shot, edited, and already paid to store, rented back to them for display.

The solution

PocketRack's first question was not "what do you need?" It was "how much do you shoot per year, and how much have you accumulated?" Knowing the studio's actual file growth rate let PocketRack size the NAS to cover five years of shooting without needing a hardware replacement mid-cycle.

The networking decision followed the same logic. Moving files to an on-site NAS closed the distance between photographers and their work. PocketRack added 10-gigabit Ethernet so the connection ran at 900+ Mbps. The sync wait dropped to zero.

The gallery platform replacement came out of the same install. PocketWeb, running on the same PocketBundle as the NAS and networking gear, let the studio host client galleries on their own hardware behind their own domain. The $120/month platform became unnecessary on day one.

The install took half a day. PocketRack walked the team through the system before leaving and left a plain-English runbook covering drive replacement, storage expansion, and support contacts. The studio owner said it was the first piece of IT documentation she had read in full.

The results

Before

$920/month in cloud storage and gallery platform fees. File transfers at ~50 Mbps — photographers waited on syncs before editing could start. All files stored in a single cloud account with no local copy and no documented backup procedure. No runbook.

After

$0/month in cloud and gallery fees. File transfers at 900+ Mbps — photographers edit directly off the NAS at full speed. 3-2-1 backup in place: local NAS, fireproof on-site drive, and a cold cloud archive at roughly 1/10th of prior monthly cost. Plain-English runbook in place; staff handles routine maintenance without a support call.

The faster editing workflow freed enough time to take on 40 more sessions in the first year. Same three people. No new hires.