Aviary's editor inside of Bigstock

What would it cost for a company to throw a photo editor into their mobile app? According to some of the partners working with Aviary, matching the effects they get from using their API would require quite the investment.

“I’d say it’s safe to estimate, to cover the range of options built into Aviary, it would take a good 4 to 6 months of dev time and then likely a single full time person just expanding the filter set, bug fixing and adding new stuff ongoing," said Josh Lehman, Product Manager at OneLouder Apps, the creator of Friendcaster for Facebook.

That adds up to several hundred thousand dollars in costs. So it's no surprise that Aviary, which produces a suite of simple, powerful photo editing tools for websites and mobile apps, has found a wealth of partners for its API and mobile SDK, now being used by over 300 partners after being released three months ago.

“Aviary allows us to incorporate editing features that we otherwise couldn’t. Not just because of the cost of developing it ourselves, but because replicating the quality of the product would be difficult," said Boris Masis, product lead at Bigstock.

Photos are Facebook's killer app, and the companies that have been using Aviary to add photo editing to their services have found increased engagement, on average 90 seconds in the editor itself. "Ever since Halftone was released, users have asked for the ability to crop, rotate, and edit image properties like brightness, saturation, and contrast. While those features were on our list, they always took a back seat to other enhancements," said Mike Swanson, owner of Juicy Bits, the creator of Halftone. "So, we were thrilled to learn about the Aviary iOS SDK. And it took less than 15 minutes to download the SDK and integrate it with Halftone."

The long term plan isn't public yet, but from what we understand (thanks super top secret sources!), the goal for Aviary is to start offering premium services on top of the basic photo editor. If the company can help these third party services to better monetize their users, then they can collect part of that additional revenue stream. Keep making partners happy, the thinking goes, and everyone will win down the road, as mobile and photo sharing continue to boom.