Frequently Asked Questions

Cloudinary is an end-to-end image management solution for your website and mobile apps. Cloudinary covers everything from image uploads, storage, manipulations, optimizations to delivery.

You can easily upload images to the cloud, automatically perform smart image manipulations without installing any complex software. All your images are then seamlessly delivered through a fast CDN, optimized and using industry best practices.

Cloudinary offers comprehensive APIs and administration capabilities and is easy to integrate with new and existing web and mobile applications.

Of-course. Cloudinary has a fully-featured free plan available. Sign up takes just a few seconds and you're ready to go. Sign up now!

You can use the free plan for as long as you want. If your usage requirements ever grow above the free plan's generous usage limits, you can easily upgrade to the plan that best fits your needs.

Cloudinary's pricing covers your end-to-end image-related costs - image management, processing, transformations, effects and manipulation features, all managed storage and IO costs and all image viewing bandwidth usage & requests costs while delivering images through Akamai's CDN, and of-course the service itself (APIs, SDKs, admin console, support, availability, etc.).

Cloudinary's price will always be more cost effective than doing all of this in-house.

Of-course. Cloudinary can handle virtually limitless amount of image uploads, transformations and deliveries. Contact us and tell us about your unique requirements. We'll tailor a plan perfect for your needs.

Integration with Cloudinary is very straightforward. In addition, we have client libraries for all popular development frameworks, thorough documentation, easy to use APIs, and great support. We've got you covered :)

Many thousands of websites and mobile applications world-wide. You can see a few of our clients featured on our homepage. Check out what people are saying about us on Twitter.

Cloudinary's limits are soft limits. Once you exceed these, we'll ping and ask you nicely to upgrade to a plan that best covers your needs.

You can upgrade your free or paid account at any time from your management console. Just click any of the upgrade links. You will be discounted for the unused monthly period of your previous plan.

Once on Cloudinary, all of your website's images will be optimized, cached and served via Akamai.

Yes, but not with our off-the-shelf plans. Please contact us if you need a custom quote with your own CDN.

Once uploaded to Cloudinary, your images are safely stored on Cloudinary's Amazon S3 account using multiple backups and multi-region redundancies. If you wish, we can automatically back your images to your own S3 as well (available to any of our paid plans), or you can use our APIs to browse your existing images and copy them to your own storage solution. Our Premium customers can choose to store their Cloudinary raw assets on their own S3, managing redundancies and availability themselves.

Yes. Cloudinary offers a complete image-management solution, but will manage any file type you throw at it, including videos, textual files and more. Cloudinary will serve such non-image files as-is. Do notice that you can not use Cloudinary to manage illegal or highly controversial content. If you're uncertain whether your files fall into this category, you may want to read our TOS and our CDN partner's Acceptable Use Policy.

Total images are the sum of original resources and derived resources currently stored in your Cloudinary account. Monthly transformations is the number of times an original is uploaded or a derived resource is created for the first time. Images and videos accessed subsequently to initial creation, do not increment the monthly transformations counter.

Video storage and viewing is counted towards your storage and bandwidth limits exactly as images do.

When videos are uploaded to Cloudinary, or manipulated, each 1 second of standard definition video is counted as 2 "transformations" towards your quota. HD video is counted as 4 transformations.

Notice that each uniquely manipulated video is counted only once. This means that if you generate a new 10 seconds SD video it will be counted as 20 transformations, regardless if your users view it once or a million times.

You can view the exact monthly transformations usage breakdown in your Cloudinary dashboard.

Cloudinary, unlike CDN providers, counts only net viewing bandwidth. We do not count or charge you extra for non-US traffic, HTTPS traffic, Midgress bandwidth, TCP overheads, and don't charge you according to the number of files viewed (cost per request) or for traffic to origin.

Together with Cloudinary's extensive image and video size optimization capabilities, your actual bandwidth with Cloudinary should end up considerably less than your current bandwidth.

You can post a message on our support site, or email support@cloudinary.com. Feedback, partnerships and general inquiries? Contact us here.