Is HEIC Patent Risk Real for Small Web Services?

Apple uses HEIC as the default iPhone photo format — which means almost every image your users upload from iOS is potentially HEIC. But HEIC is built on HEVC, which is encumbered by a messy patent pool (MPEG LA + HEVC Advance). The question If you're running a small, free image converter that processes HEIC files server-side, are you actually exposed to legal risk? Here's what I found after researching this for Convertify: Patent holders typically target device manufacturers and encoders, not we