Cloud Backup Provider IDrive Enters API Market With Face Recognition Tool
IDrive expands beyond cloud backup by launching IDrive Face, a face recognition API that competes directly with AWS Rekognition on price. The new developer tool offers face detection, comparison, and emotion analysis at a lower cost than major cloud providers.
Online backup provider IDrive launches a new face recognition API called IDrive Face, marking the company's first entry into the API business. While stepping outside its traditional cloud storage market seems unexpected, IDrive actually builds this new service on existing technology from IDrive People, a feature that helps users locate faces within their backed-up photos.
The API provides standard face detection tools that deliver bounding boxes and metadata for multiple faces in a single image. Developers also gain access to face comparison and verification capabilities for identifying individuals, alongside optional features that detect gender, age, and emotions. IDrive promises accuracy and performance comparable to AWS Rekognition, while keeping all API requests fully encrypted.
IDrive aggressively prices its new offering to undercut Amazon, charging a flat monthly fee of $49.50 for developers or $124.50 for businesses, plus a tiny per-transaction fee of $0.0001. While AWS Rekognition includes extra features like object and scene recognition that IDrive lacks, most serious users pay significantly more for the Amazon service compared to this specialized, face-only alternative.