Find the best prices for image transformations

I have been researching image transformation solutions lately, as I was curious if Cloudinary was the best option for my side project.

I’m still on the free plan for Cloudinary, and I have gotten some extra credits from them for retweeting and doing some other small advertising tasks for them.

Its kind of hard to figure out exactly how much usage you can get from the free tier, but these are my calculations:

How much can Cloudinary free tier serve with the 25 credit quota:

5000 images à 2MB (10GB of quota) +
5000 transformations (5 of quota) +
150.000 requests à 70Kb (10 of quota)

If this is month 1, then on month 2 expecting the same amount of transformations and request you would not be able to upload any more images.

But with these numbers I would still be safe on the free plan for the foreseeable future.

ImageKit are kind of similar to Cloudinary and also has a quota based plan system. On their free plan you get:

25GB requests bandwidth
5GB image storage quota
Unlimited transformations

And with the following amount of images and traffic you would exceed the quota for a month: 2500 images à 2MB (5GB)

375.000 requests à 70Kb (25GB of quota)

So with both these services you would be hard limited by the amount of uploaded images. Not so much by the transformations and traffic.

A new actor in this field is Cloudflare, they advertise with 5000 free transformations each month, but they downplay that they charge for all traffic. So as far as I can see you wont be on a total free plan with them.

And the last provider I considered turned out the be the cheapest by far, not surprising since I guess both Cloudinary and ImageKit bases their platforms on top of AWS.

The pricing of AWS is always tricky to figure out, but I made an attempt at it, where I tried to compare all these 4 services like for like.

Cost calculations premise of the paid versions:

100.000 original images, average size 400Kb - 40GB
20% of the library is renewed every month
1 million image requests per month, average size 22Kb - 22GB

So you can see that with these calculations AWS would be 10x cheaper than both Cloudinary and ImageKit, but both these have quite a bit more room in their quotas.

Cloudflare is also a good choice, and it is significantly easier to use than AWS because with AWS you have to setup all the infrastructure yourself. There are good guides for this, but its definitely not for everyone.

Cloudinary offers a good website with a backend for viewing and managing your images, so thats lacking from Cloudflare as far as I can tell.

And both Cloudinary and ImageKit handles videos out of the box, so thats something to consider if you rely on video support.

I also tried calculating the cost of the Cloudinary free tier if hosted on AWS:

Storing of the images in 2 S3 buckets: (5000 images x 2000 Kb + 5000 images x 70 Kb) / 1024 / 1024 x 0.023 = 0.22$

Transforming: seems to be 0.37$

So a total of $0.59 per month.

Some other comparisons between the four providers:

AWS and Cloudinary both support these common filetypes: PNG, GIF, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, SVG. As well as some animated versions of the same.

While Cloudflare doesnt support HEIC and AVIF, and ImageKit doesnt support HEIC (the apple format)

After all this calculating I decided to make it into a webpage so others can calculate this for themselves. I also added more providers, and more calculators for other SaaS stuff aswell. You can find the best prices for PostgreSQL databases, transactional email, web analytics and authentication providers.

Go to https://saasprices.net/images to see the calculator