Cloudinary pricing
How Cloudinary charges, what to know before you commit, and what you'd pay at your usage — next to what the alternatives would cost for the same thing.
How it charges
Checked 2026-10-08 on cloudinary.com ↗ · USD, list pricesMonthly credits shared between storage, transformations and bandwidth — 1 credit is 1 GB stored, 1,000 transformations or 1 GB delivered: free for 25 credits, $99 for 225, $249 for 600.
- Free plan
- Yes
- Cheapest paid plan
- $99/mo
- Side project
- $0/mo Free
- Growing
- $99/mo Plus
- Scaling
- over plan limits
What the model leaves out
One credit is 1 GB stored (about 2,000 originals at 500 KB), 1,000 transformations or 1 GB delivered, all drawn from the same monthly credits; the self-serve plans sell no extra credits. Derived assets also count toward storage, so real storage use is higher than originals alone. Cloudinary’s documentation mentions a Pro pay-as-you-go tier at $0.45 per extra credit, but the live pricing page lists only Free, Plus, Advanced and Enterprise, so it isn’t modelled. Video processing and video bandwidth are left out; add-ons are extra. Enterprise is custom-priced.
- One credit pool covers everything, so heavy bandwidth leaves fewer credits for transformations and storage; the dashboard shows the breakdown.
- Free, Plus and Advanced have no metered overage on the pricing page: going over brings warnings and upgrade prompts, and if usage stays high the account can be partially and then fully disabled.
- Uploads (including overwrites) and every new transformation URL count as transformations; f_auto and q_auto are not free, and AI effects cost many transformations each (background removal 75).
- Storage counts all managed assets, including the derived versions Cloudinary keeps, not just your originals.
- Plus and Advanced are $89 and $224 a month billed yearly.
| Plan | Monthly fee | Credits | Images stored | New image variants generated per month | Images delivered per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free3 users, 1 account. | Free | 25 credits included | — | — | — |
| Plus3 users, 2 accounts. | $99/mo | 225 credits included | — | — | — |
| Advanced5 users, 3 accounts. | $249/mo | 600 credits included | — | — | — |
One credit buys 2k images, or 1k transformations, or 1 GB; every kind of usage draws on the same credits.
What you'd pay
Plus$99 plan$99/mo
Cost as you grow
All image & video hosting pricing, compared →Which one fits your situation →