Cloudinary cost calculator: paste your URL, see your bill

Scan your site and get an estimate

Enter the address of a page that shows your images, like a product page or your home page. We read that page once, count the Cloudinary image URLs in it and measure up to 20 of the images. Then we fill in the numbers below. Change any of them.

What the scan does and does not see

The scan fetches one page, the one you give it. It does not log in, follow links or run scripts. It looks for Cloudinary delivery URLs in the page's HTML.

• Shared addresses. res.cloudinary.com/<cloud>/image/upload/.... Any plan can use these.
• Private CDN addresses. <cloud>-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/....
• Your own domain. Any address with the /image/upload/ path and transformation parameters, like img.example.com/image/upload/w_400,c_fill/shoe.jpg. This is a guess from the shape of the URL.

For each image URL it reads the transformation string, such as w_400,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto. It counts the different ones and checks whether f_auto and q_auto are in use. Then it asks for up to 20 different images, one per picture, and reads how many bytes each one is. It sends the same Accept header a current browser sends, so a URL with f_auto usually comes back as AVIF or WebP.

A custom domain or a private CDN address is a plan signal. Cloudinary lists a custom domain (CNAME) from the Advanced plan, at $249 a month. We treat both signs as Advanced or higher. It is a signal, not proof, so the checkbox stays yours to change.

Limits

• Public websites only, on the standard web ports. No IP addresses, no internal names.
• At most 3 redirects, 8 seconds for the page and 3 MB of HTML.
• 20 scans an hour for each visitor.

What it misses

Images that scripts add after the page loads, images that only appear in CSS files, and every page but the one you gave. A page with a lazy-loaded gallery may show fewer images than visitors see. A picture served in several sizes is measured at one of them, the middle one, and the first request for a size Cloudinary has not made yet can be slow. If you know your number, type it over ours.

What we keep

We do not keep the address or the page. We count that a scan happened, with a one-way hash of your IP address and the date. That is how we limit scans per visitor.

How the estimate is worked out

Cloudinary bills in credits. One credit is 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of managed storage or 1 GB of image bandwidth. You spend them in any mix, up to the plan's monthly total. The pricing guide explains each part. The estimate is three sums and one lookup.

1. Bandwidth. Page views × images per page × average size. 100,000 views × 12 images × 120 KB is 144 GB, or 144 credits.
2. Storage. Your originals plus a stored copy of every size. 40 GB of originals plus 20,000 images × 6 sizes × 120 KB (14.4 GB) is 54.4 credits.
3. Transformations. New transformations a month ÷ 1,000. 10,000 new ones is 10 credits.
4. The plan. The cheapest plan whose credits cover the total, and that has a custom domain if you need one. 144 + 54.4 + 10 is 208.4 credits. That fits Plus, which has 225 and costs $99 a month.

Past 2,750 credits the estimate adds $0.45 for each extra credit on top of Pro PAYG, as Cloudinary's pricing summary describes.

The Flatpix line uses the plan limits on our home page: Starter covers 25,000 original images and 500 GB delivered, Growth 250,000 and 2 TB, Scale unlimited originals and 10 TB. We take the smallest plan that covers both numbers. The yearly difference is twelve months of each price. In the example, Plus costs $1,188 a year and Flatpix Starter $468.

The Cloudinary plans used

These are the self-service plans for Cloudinary's Image and Video APIs, read on 28 October 2026. Enterprise is custom and not public.

Source: Cloudinary's pricing page and pricing summary, 28 October 2026. The custom domain column follows the feature lists: Advanced is the first plan to list a custom domain (CNAME), and the higher plans include Advanced's features.

What the estimate leaves out

• Video. It is counted per second, not per GB. The scan reports video URLs it finds but does not price them.
• Add-ons. Paid add-ons and AI features have their own rules.
• The rolling window. On Free, Plus, Advanced and Advanced Extra, transformations and bandwidth count over the last 30 days, not the calendar month. A spike stays in your total for 30 days.
• Caching and bots. The estimate counts every image on every view. Browser caching and lazy loading lower the real number. Crawlers and hotlinking raise it.
• The move. If you are moving in, the first 30 days count every upload and the first request for every size.

Treat the result as a range. If it lands near a plan's limit, check your real usage in Cloudinary before you decide.

If the number is too high

• Serve fewer bytes. One GB of bandwidth costs a whole credit. One transformation costs a thousandth of one. The scan tells you whether f_auto and q_auto are in use. If they are not, measure what they do to your own images.
• Use a fixed set of sizes. Every new width is a new transformation and a new stored copy.
• Delete what you do not use. Storage is a live total, so it drops when you delete.
• Pay yearly. It saves about 10%.

The pricing guide has more, and the alternatives guide compares what other image services charge.

Where Flatpix fits

Flatpix is for teams whose Cloudinary bill is hard to predict. It reads Cloudinary-style URLs, so switching is a domain change, not a rewrite. w_400,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto stays as it is.

You pay one flat monthly price for a plan: $39, $99 or $249. There are no credits and no overage bills. Your originals stay in a bucket you own (S3, R2 or Google Cloud Storage), so that storage is a separate bill. Flatpix has no video. If you depend on Cloudinary's video tools, its media library or its add-ons, Flatpix is not a replacement.

Questions

Sources

All pages were read on 28 October 2026. Prices and limits change, so confirm them at the source.

1. Cloudinary: Pricing. Plans, prices, credits per plan, the credit definition, the custom domain (CNAME) feature.
2. Cloudinary: Compare plans and FAQ. Advanced Extra and Pro, and what a monthly transformation is.
3. Cloudinary: Pricing, a markdown summary. The $0.45 Pro PAYG credit price and annual savings of about 10%.
4. Cloudinary docs: Billing and plans. Storage includes cached copies, and the rolling 30-day window.
5. Cloudinary docs: How do Cloudinary credits work?. Credits and the 30-day window.
6. Cloudinary docs: Transformation counts. Uploads count, and the per-second video rates.