Frequently Asked Questions

Cloudinary is an end-to-end image- and video-management solution for websites and mobile apps, covering everything from image and video uploads, storage, manipulations, optimizations to delivery.

With Cloudinary, you can easily upload images and videos to the cloud and automate smart manipulations of those media without installing any other software. Cloudinary then seamlessly delivers your media through a fast content delivery network (CDN), optimized with the industry’s best practices.

Additionally, Cloudinary offers comprehensive APIs and administration capabilities, which you can easily integrate with your web and mobile apps.

Absolutely. Cloudinary offers a full-featured, free plan with a generous usage limit. Signing up takes only a few seconds.

No. You can use the free plan for as long as you want. If your usage requirement grows beyond that plan’s limit, you can easily upgrade to one that best fits your needs.

Cloudinary’s pricing covers all end-to-end media-related costs: management, processing, transformations, effects, manipulations, managed storage and I/O, also media-viewing bandwidth and requests. Also included are delivery through the CDN and the service itself (APIs, SDKs, admin console, support, availability, etc.).

Leveraging Cloudinary for media management is always more cost-effective than doing it in-house.

Definitely. Cloudinary can handle limitless media uploads, transformations, and deliveries. Contact us with your requirements. We’ll tailor a plan that fits your needs.

Integrating with Cloudinary is a straightforward, painless process. In addition, we offer client libraries for all popular development frameworks, detailed documentation, intuitive APIs, and excellent customer support. We’ve got you covered.

Tens of thousands of websites and mobile apps worldwide are managed with Cloudinary. Some of our customers are featured on our homepage. And do check out what people say about us on Twitter.

Cloudinary’s plan limits are soft limits. If you exceed them, we’ll ping you and suggest that you upgrade to a plan that best covers your needs.

Just click one of the upgrade links on your management console. If you’re on a paid plan, you will receive a discount for the unused period of your plan.

All our users, including those on the free plan, enjoy CDN delivery worldwide. Smart CDN selection and dynamic multi-CDN switching features are available to enterprise customers. Currently, Cloudinary supports those features for three CDNs: Akamai, Fastly, and CloudFront.

Yes, but not with our off-the-shelf plans. Contact us for a custom quote for your own CDN.

We store uploaded media on our Amazon Web Services (AWS) account with multiple backups and multiregion redundancies for maximum security. If you wish, we can also back-up your images to your own S3 bucket, which is a feature that’s available to our paid plans.

Alternatively, you can copy your uploaded images and videos to your own storage with our APIs. Our premium customers are free to store their Cloudinary media assets on their own S3 bucket, managing redundancies and availability themselves.

Yes. As a complete media-management solution, Cloudinary can serve all file types as is, including images, videos, as well as audio, text and document files.

However, you must not manage illegal or highly controversial content on Cloudinary. To find out if your content falls into those categories, read our Terms of Use and our CDN partner’s Acceptable Use Policy.

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

Video storage and viewing are counted toward your storage and bandwidth limits exactly as images.

When you upload videos to or manipulate them on Cloudinary, each second of standard-definition (SD) video is counted as two transformations toward your quota. High-definition (HD) video is counted as four transformations. Each uniquely manipulated video is counted only once. For example, if you generate a 10-second SD video, Cloudinary counts it as 20 transformations regardless of the number of times it’s viewed by your users.

For a breakdown of your transformation usage by month, see your Cloudinary dashboard.

For each viewed or downloaded resource, Cloudinary charges you a flat fee according to its size (in bytes). We don’t count Midgress bandwidth; you don’t pay per request; and you don’t pay differently according to the geography of your visitors. In addition, we don’t charge for HTTPS requests, for traffic to origin (i.e., traffic from the CDN to Cloudinary servers), or for invalidations.

By taking advantage of Cloudinary’s extensive size-optimization capabilities for media, you’d incur considerably less bandwidth with us than you currently do.

Visit our support site or documentation page, or take a course at the Cloudinary Academy. Alternatively, write us at support@cloudinary.com. For feedback, partnerships, and general inquiries, fill out the Contact Us Form.