Panono Makes Decision To Hold Its Camera Customers Hostage Behind a Paywall

John Aldred, writing for DIYPhotography: We all know the risks when we back a crowdfunding campaign. Although the risk is typically that the project will fail, the company goes bust, never delivers on the products and all the backers are out of pocket. What backers don’t expect is that a successful campaign backed based on set terms suddenly decides to start charging extra for part of that service way down the line. Panono launched on Indiegogo way back in 2013. It’s a “Panoramic Ball Camera” offering 360-degree views with a whopping 108-megapixels. Even today, that’s mighty impressive. You need to utilise their cloud service for processing the images, which was included in the purchase price of the camera. Now, they’ve decided to start charging for it. The campaign raised over $1.25 million with a goal of $900,000, and even had the support of former Leica CEO, Ralf Coenen. Bringing things to the current day, an email was sent out to Panono users stating that the previously free service was, from September 1st, 2019, going to cost $0.88 per image to process and stitch using their cloud platform.