Cloudinary pricing # Cloudinary pricing, explained. Cloudinary doesn't bill in gigabytes or requests — it bills in **credits**, and one pool of credits funds your storage, your bandwidth and your transformations at the same time. That single design choice is what makes a credit plan hard to compare against per-gigabyte pricing. Here's what each tier actually includes. ## The plans Plan Billed monthly Billed annually (per month) Monthly credits Seats Free $0 $0 25 3 users / 1 account Plus $99/mo $89/mo 225 3 users / 2 accounts Advanced $249/mo $224/mo 600 5 users / 3 accounts Enterprise Not published Not published Not published Contact sales Figures read from [cloudinary.com/pricing](https://cloudinary.com/pricing) on 5 September 2026. Cloudinary can change plans at any time — check their page before you commit. Enterprise pricing isn't published. ## What a credit is worth Cloudinary defines one credit as any _one_ of the following. They're interchangeable, and they all draw from the same monthly allowance. ### 1,000 transformations Each new variant generated — a resize, crop, format conversion or effect. Once a variant exists it is cached, so repeat views bill as bandwidth rather than a second transformation. ### 1 GB of managed storage What you keep in Cloudinary, charged for as long as you keep it there. ### 1 GB of image bandwidth What you serve to visitors. Video bandwidth is boosted 2:1 on paid plans, so a credit covers 2 GB. ## Why the free tier runs out faster than it looks The free plan's 25 monthly credits work out to 25 GB of image bandwidth only if you store nothing and transform nothing. In reality all three compete for the same pool. A small site storing 5 GB of images, serving 15 GB of image bandwidth, and generating 5,000 transformations spends 5 + 15 + 5 = **25 credits** — the entire free allowance, from what most people would call a modest month. Cloudinary also counts cached copies of generated variants toward managed storage, so a transformation-heavy month pushes the storage figure up as well. This is also why the paid tiers are hard to forecast. Your bill doesn't track one number you can watch; it tracks the sum of three that move independently. Traffic spikes and a growing media library both eat the same budget, so the month you get featured somewhere is the month storage and bandwidth squeeze your transformation headroom at once. ## When Cloudinary is worth it Being straight about this: if transformations are genuinely core to your product, Cloudinary is very good at them, and the credit model is reasonable when transformation volume is the thing you're actually buying. Video, a digital asset manager, multiple sub-accounts, and a deep effects pipeline are real capabilities that a lean image host doesn't replace. Teams that need those are not overpaying. Where it stops making sense is the common case: you upload images and serve them from a CDN. There, much of the $89–$99/month pays for a transformation pipeline you may not use, and the credit model turns straightforward hosting into a forecasting exercise. ## If you're just hosting images PixelVault is flat-priced for exactly that case — a permanent free tier (200 MB storage, 500 uploads/month, 1 GB bandwidth), [paid plans rolling out from $9/month](/pricing), and **zero egress fees**, so serving more traffic never changes the bill. URL-based transforms — resize, crop, format conversion, background removal, watermarking — are included on every plan with no per-transformation credits. If you want the wider field rather than one option, we keep an honest roundup of the [best Cloudinary alternatives](/alternatives/best-cloudinary-alternatives), including where ImageKit, Imgix and Cloudflare Images beat us. ## Cloudinary pricing FAQ Is Cloudinary free? There is a free plan at $0 with no credit card required. It includes 25 monthly credits and 3 users on 1 account. Because credits are shared across storage, bandwidth and transformations, what the free plan gets you depends entirely on which of the three you lean on. What are Cloudinary's free tier limits? 25 credits per month. One credit covers 1,000 transformations, or 1 GB of managed storage, or 1 GB of image bandwidth — interchangeably. So 25 credits is 25 GB of bandwidth only if you store nothing and transform nothing; in practice the three draw from the same pool. How much does Cloudinary cost? Plus is $99/month billed monthly or $89/month billed annually, and includes 225 monthly credits. Advanced is $249/month billed monthly or $224/month billed annually, with 600 monthly credits. Enterprise is quoted by sales. What is a Cloudinary credit? A single unit spent interchangeably across services: 1 credit equals 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of managed storage, or 1 GB of image bandwidth. Video bandwidth is boosted 2:1 on paid plans, so 1 credit covers 2 GB. One pool funds all of it, which is what makes the monthly bill hard to forecast. Does Cloudinary charge for bandwidth? Bandwidth consumes credits from the same monthly allowance as storage and transformations. Cloudinary's pricing page does not publish per-unit overage rates for exceeding your credits, so what you pay past the cap is not something you can work out in advance from the public page. How does Cloudinary's credit pricing compare to flat-rate hosting? A credit plan bills one pool against storage, bandwidth and transformations together, so the monthly figure moves with all three. Flat-rate hosts charge a fixed price and meter fewer things — which is cheaper depends entirely on your mix. If transformation volume is what you are buying, credits are a reasonable model; if you mostly store and serve, you are funding capacity you do not draw on. ## Flat pricing, no credits to budget 200 MB storage, 500 uploads/month, zero egress fees. No credit card. [See PixelVault pricing](/pricing)