I feel like this is some really compelling tech. It would be so amazing to build stuff with this in mind. I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, though. This sort of API is available only until Google decide that they don't want it to be available. There's not really anything close to equivalent that you could drop in to replace it if it were being shut down, the price were being hiked, or you had some sort of other issue with it.

I'm not trying to pick on Google for shutting things down; I would feel similarly if this API were from Microsoft or Facebook. It's not the first time there's been an API that I think is really cool, but was very apprehensive about actually using for anything serious.

TensorFlow + TensorFlow Serving + Google ReCeption model plus optionally a SVN on ReCeption features for your custom detection. All that code and the pretrained model is Open Source. There's some engineering to glue it together and some extra work for the easier, non-image classification parts.

There is also http://www.deepdetect.com

can you provide some links ?

TensorFlow Serving: https://github.com/tensorflow/serving

ReCeption (actually they call in Inception v3. Not sure where I got the ReCeption name - though I'm sure I read it somewhere?): https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.7/tutorials/image_rec...

Using a SVN on neural network extracted features: http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/convolutional-neural...

If you want a quick and dirty version here's some Python to create a web service that calls a Caffe based Image recognizer: https://gist.github.com/nlothian/c3519adb81b3452c1938