I didn't set out to build an image host. I set out to use one. I was pushing images through a workflow — screenshots, generated assets, thumbnails — and I needed a URL for each one. ImgBB was the obvious pick: paste, upload, get a link. For throwaway stuff, it's great, and I'm not here to dunk on it.
The trouble started when the work stopped being throwaway.
Wall #1: I couldn't get an invoice for my company
This sounds mundane until you've lived it. If you're a freelancer, an agency, or anyone running work through a company, every tool you pay for needs to produce a proper invoice — your company name, your address, the tax/VAT details, something your accountant will accept. That's not a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a tool you can expense and a personal receipt that quietly comes out of your own pocket.
I couldn't get that. A consumer image host is built to charge a person, not a business — the billing is a personal receipt with no way to put a company on it. For a fifteen-dollar hobby that's fine. For something baked into client work, it's a dealbreaker. I don't want to explain to a client's finance team why my "hosting infrastructure" is a screenshot of a card statement.
So the first thing PixelVault is built to do is bill you like a business. When paid plans go live, they issue a real invoice with your company details — the kind you can hand to accounting without a second thought.
Wall #2: the URL wasn't mine
The second wall was quieter but it nagged at me. Every image I uploaded lived at someone else's domain. When you paste that link into a client deck, a product page, or a doc, you're advertising a third party — and you're one policy change or shutdown away from every one of those links breaking.
What I wanted was boring and obvious: serve the images from img.mydomain.com. My brand on the URL, my domain, portable if I ever move. That's table stakes for anything customer-facing, and almost no simple host lets you do it.
Custom domains are on PixelVault's paid plans — one on Starter, three on Pro. I'm rolling them out as paid customers need them, so if that's the feature standing between you and switching, tell me and it moves up the list.
So I built the host I wanted
Once you're solving those two problems, you may as well fix the rest of what bugs developers about consumer image hosts. PixelVault is a real REST API with per-project API keys, a global CDN with zero egress fees, and image management — list, fetch, delete — instead of an upload-only endpoint. It's built for agents and developers, not anonymous drag-and-drop.
But the honest origin story isn't the API. It's that I wanted an image host I could put on an invoice and serve from my own domain — and I couldn't find one. If you've hit the same two walls, that's exactly who I built this for.
Free to start
The free tier includes 200 MB storage, 500 uploads/month, and 1 GB bandwidth — no credit card, no trial expiry. Paid plans (with proper company invoicing and custom domains) start at $9/month as they roll out.