Early last month, the portfolio app Cara shot to the top of the app store. Billed as a platform that would protect artists’ work from AI, the app experienced a rare instance of modern-day virality: Over just one weekend, its user base tripled from less than 100,000 to more than 300,000 profiles. But, according to a new post from the app’s founder, Cara’s success on paper has come with a new set of challenges.
Cara debuted more than a year ago, but its meteoric rise to fame only kicked off around May 31. News broke that Meta was training its generative AI tool on Instagram posts, and plenty of artists decided to jump ship to Cara in response. For most users, Cara’s main appeal is its policy on AI. The app promises not to train AI models on its content, and it also uses software like Cara Glaze and html metadata tags to deter AI scrapers (though the actual efficacy of such tools is debatable). Since June, the site has continued to grow, recently surpassing one million users and five million images posted.
Artist Abigail Larson, who joined Cara early in its development, says the app was initially like a “ghost town” before it gained mainstream attention, at which point her own account hit 20,000 followers in just two weeks. Now that the dust has settled, Cara’s founder Jingna Zhang has posted a financial update on the platform that demonstrates the drawbacks of early virality—and the difficulty of building trust with human artists in the AI age.
FACING NEW FINANCIAL REALITIES
To start, Zhang shared, running Cara is expensive. Before the app blew up, she intentionally steered clear of promotion in order to avoid the costs that come with scale. Her initial plan was to wait until all of the app’s features were complete, pilot subscriptions in the meantime to see how much they would offset expenses, and raise money from “trusted people like friends and family.” But once the momentum got started in early June, there wasn’t much her team could do besides watch it play out.
Hosting charges surged from $2,000 per month to $100,000 for a week of traffic when the platform went viral, according to Zhang’s blog post. Now that growth has stabilized, Zhang estimates it will cost $660,000 to host Cara for a year.
Zhang’s team is scrambling both to moderate the influx of spam content (porn bots are an issue, for one) and to figure out how to finance the platform. As an initial effort, Cara began asking for donations on the crowdfunding site Buy Me a Coffee—though Zhang views this kind of support as a temporary solution for a larger problem.
In a post to the app, Angelo Sotia, the co-founder and former CEO of the portfolio platform DeviantArt, suggested that Cara enforce a subscription-only paywall. DeviantArt, for its own part, has become notorious for instituting more paywalls over the years to remain profitable.
However, as an early DeviantArt user herself, Zhang is reluctant to commit to the idea. “I realize how a paywall can help cut down bots and reduce scraping for Gen AI. It truly is appealing for artists,” Zhang wrote. “But even so, my vision for Cara is to benefit the greatest number of people for as much and as long as I can.”
Zhang’s commitment to keeping the platform open isn’t going unnoticed. According to Larson, who used DeviantArt for almost two decades, Cara has some of the charm that DeviantArt lost. “Cara is like the grown-up version of [DeviantArt and ArtStation],” Larson says. “It’s sophisticated and well-organized—even in beta mode—because it was designed by artists, for artists. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to the late ‘90s early 2000’s forum-style internet days, but as a professional artist, this is a step in the right direction.”
Currently, Zhang’s financial plan is to work on “optimizing code for cost reduction and scale,” while implementing some in-app subscriptions and considering offers from venture capital firms. She will also pursue a round of fundraising from trusted friends.
SUPPORTING ARTISTS, ADDRESSING CRITICS
Aside from its financial woes, Cara is facing internal pressure from its artist community.
“The biggest grief I’ve had since founding Cara was the amount of hate and harassment I have had to deal with from the artist community critical of us,” Zhang wrote, referring to critical reactions related to app bugs and policies, as well as features the Cara team isn’t able to build. “People get so angry and abusive, yell at us in caps, call us names, and would say some very, very horrible things.”
Professional artists today have some reason to be sensitive about their work, as AI becomes increasingly powerful and popular platforms like DeviantArt and ArtStation become overwhelmingly commercial. Larson points out that plenty of artists are exhausted by the prospect of building a brand new audience. “It’s wise to be wary of anything too hot or shiny or new when it comes to social media platforms,” she says.
However, directing that frustration at Zhang and her team seems counterintuitive, given their efforts to center community feedback despite the site seemingly becoming more and more difficult to manage. Larson, for her part, thinks it’s reasonable for Cara to begin implementing some sort of payment model.
“I know that it costs money—a lot of money—to run a social media site like Cara, with over a million users posting art every day, so eventually something will have to change,” Larson says, adding that she’d pay an annual fee to use it. But like Zhang, Larson’s concern with a paywall is that it would deter new users.
“One of the great things about social media is having a free platform to see a huge variety of art from people all around the world,” Larson says. “I sincerely hope there’s a good middle ground for the app so that everyone who wants to enjoy and share art, can.”
