Sub-accounts

ImageKit allows the creation of multiple child sub-accounts, enabling you to manage multiple websites, brands, or environments under one parent account.

A parent account is a special kind of ImageKit account that can only be used for creating and managing sub-accounts and handling their billing, not for media delivery or management. You cannot directly sign up for a parent account, and only ImageKit's team can convert an existing account into one.

Under a parent account, each sub-account is like a new, regular ImageKit account operating independently with its own configuration, settings, API keys, etc. As covered here, billing for sub-accounts can be handled in two ways.

• Segregating media delivery and management across multiple clients: If you are an agency or an ImageKit partner, organize and secure each client's assets and configuration in separate sub-accounts. This ensures data privacy and enables tailored analytics, optimization strategies, billing, and access control.

• Brand and Product Line Isolation: Use dedicated sub-accounts to isolate assets for different brands or product lines, facilitating brand-level analytics, billing, access control, and media processing strategies.

• Environment Segregation and testing: Create sub-accounts for different development, staging, and production environments to simplify development and new feature adoption in lower environments before rolling out changes in production.

• Segregate Billing and Analytics: Independently access usage and billing for each sub-account to optimize costs and resource utilization.

ImageKit offers two billing models for sub-accounts. Both the models can be used in parallel.

1. Bill to Parent: The parent account is responsible for all charges incurred by the sub-accounts. This model suits organizations that want to manage billing centrally and have a single payment method for all sub-accounts. In this mode, one invoice is generated against the parent account, combining usage from all sub-accounts set to Bill to Parent. The sub-accounts don't see the pricing plan or billing details in their dashboard.

2. Bill to Sub-account: In this model, the sub-account is billed independently, and the parent account is not responsible for the charges incurred. This model is suitable for cases where the customer using the sub-account wants to manage their own billing and negotiate their own pricing directly with ImageKit. In this mode, the child accounts are billed separately, and each has its own invoice.

To create a child sub-account, go to the Manage Account section and click on the "Add Account" button.

During account creation, you can choose ImageKit ID and Processing Region and the billing model for the sub-account.

You can also see the high-level usage by each sub-account in the parent account. For detailed usage analytics, you must have access to the sub-account with a suitable role and log in to the sub-account.