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Pricing Plan Parameters

Learn how different plans and pricing parameters work in ImageKit


ImageKit offers various plans to meet your requirements. In this document, we will examine different plan types and pricing parameters to help you understand which plan suits your requirements and how your billing will change with usage.

Plan Types

ImageKit offers two plan types, as shown on the pricing page. Complete Media Processing + DAM plans - These plans are suitable if You want to optimize, transform, and deliver images, videos, and other assets on your website or app. Your entire team wants a central place to store, manage, collaborate on, and share digital assets in a DAM, along with the ability to deliver optimized content from that DAM on your website and app. DAM-only plan - These plans are suitable if your team wants to use ImageKit only to store, manage, collaborate on, and share digital assets. While assets stored in the DAM do get built-in media optimizations and transformations, the primary use of this plan is only for digital asset management and not for media delivery on websites and apps.

Pricing Parameters

ImageKit has several different pricing parameters. First, we will understand each parameter and then see how it impacts usage and billing on different plans.

  1. Bandwidth: This is the total optimized data transfer from your account. For example, if you have a 500KB original image and can optimize it to 30KB with ImageKit, then the bandwidth used for billing is 30KB. If there are 2 million requests for this image on your website, the total bandwidth consumed is 30KB x 2 million = 60GB.

    If the image is cached on the user's device, and the request never comes to ImageKit, it is not counted towards bandwidth consumption. If the image is already processed and cached on ImageKit, it is still counted towards bandwidth consumption.

  2. Storage: This is the total size of files you upload to ImageKit's Media Library. If you upload 100 files of 2MB each, your total storage usage is 2 x 100MB = 200MB. Connecting your external storage or server with ImageKit does not count toward storage usage in ImageKit. ImageKit does not charge for internal storage generated by caching image or video transformations. You are only billed for what you upload to the Media Library.

  3. Video Processing Units: When you process any video for the first time with ImageKit, then it consumes Video Processing Units. These units are proportional to the output resolution and duration. Repeat delivery of videos does not consume video processing units; it counts only towards bandwidth.

    Read more about how video processing units are consumed.

  4. Extension Units: These units are consumed when you use third-party services integrated within ImageKit. Services such as AI tagging using Google and AWS integrations and AI-powered background removal consume extension units only when you explicitly call these operations via the API or the Media Library.

    Read more about how extension units are consumed in DAM and real-time AI transformations.

  5. Users: Any user, including the primary account administrator, with login access to the ImageKit account is considered towards this parameter. You can find the users added to your account here.

    If you use sub-accounts, and the sub-account is set to "Bill to Parent", then the users in that account also count towards the billing against this parameter on the Parent account.

    Users viewing content via Public Links or accessing the content via the CDN-powered media URLs on a website or app do not count towards this parameter.

  6. Custom Domain Names: If you use a custom domain name for media delivery with ImageKit, then the number of unique domain names you have count towards this parameter.

  7. Purge Cache Requests: This parameter counts the number of cache purge requests you issue for content cached during media delivery.

  8. Original Cache Storage: If you utilize the feature to save a copy of the original assets when using ImageKit for media delivery with your external storage, then the storage generated as a result of storing the original assets is billed against this parameter.

Free Plans and Limits

The free plans include some inclusions, as mentioned on the Plans page, sufficient for small teams or low-traffic websites and apps. The plan offers these inclusions every month and is free forever.

On the first day of every calendar month, the usage of Bandwidth, Video Processing Units (VPUs), and Extension Units reset to 0.

If you exceed the free plan inclusions in the middle of a month, the corresponding functionality will stop. You must upgrade to a paid plan to resume using the feature.

The paid plans offer some inclusions for the above pricing parameters, as mentioned on the Plans page in the base pricing. Once you exceed those inclusions, pay-per-use pricing is defined for every component.

If you are on a paid plan, you will be billed the minimum monthly fixed cost, irrespective of your monthly consumption. If the usage of some components exceeds the inclusions, you pay for the additional units you consume in that monthly billing cycle.

If your consumption falls within the free plan inclusions but you are on a paid plan, you must cancel your subscription to switch to the free plan to avoid getting billed.

Common Billing examples

Please refer to the billing examples on our pricing page under the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section.

Custom Pricing Plans

If your requirement does not fit one of the paid plans we offer, or if your billing is significantly higher than the base pricing of the paid plan, or if you want to access any of the enterprise plan features, contact our support team to discuss any custom pricing plans.

Enterprise pricing plans can also include access to a dedicated customer success manager and integration support.