How do Cloudinary credits work?

Cloudinary's self-service pricing structure is based on credits. You can flexibly utilize the credits in your free or paid plan for transformations, storage and/or bandwidth based on your use case.

One credit can be used for:

• 1000 transformations
  • Most image transformations, including complex chained transformations count as a single transformation.
  • Most video transformations are counted per second.
    (The number of transformations per second depends on the delivered video resolution).
  • Some advanced transformations or formats that require sophisticated processing have special transformation counting rules.
• 1 GB of managed storage
  • Storage includes your main asset storage, a cached copy of each derived asset (from delivered transformations), and any revisions backed up to the Cloudinary backup storage.

• 1 GB of delivered bandwidth

  • For images, the bandwidth is based on the delivered image file size.
  • For videos, 1 GB generally comes to ~500 seconds of delivered SD video or ~250 seconds of HD video.

  Or combined portions of each.

Add-on plans are billed separately from your base plan credits. Your base plan (Free, Plus, Advanced, etc.) uses credits to measure transformations, storage, and bandwidth. Add-ons each have their own pricing tiers and billing cycle, and are charged independently. Add-on usage does not consume your base plan credits and appears as separate line items on your invoice.

Add-ons include:

• Feature and processing add-ons (e.g., AI Vision, Rekognition Auto Tagging, Google Auto Tagging, and more): Extend Cloudinary's built-in capabilities with additional AI, moderation, and media processing features. Learn more

  You can view and manage your feature and processing add-on subscriptions from the Add-ons page in the Console.

• Additional user subscriptions: Increase your account's user limit beyond your base plan. Learn more

  When you've reached your plan's maximum, a banner appears on the User Management page in Console Settings with a Change user limit option.

• Additional product environment subscriptions: Increase the number of product environments beyond your base plan limit. Learn more

  When you've reached your plan's maximum, a Change Limit button appears on the Product Environments page in Console Settings.

You can view all active add-on subscriptions and their next billing dates from the Add-on Plans section of the Plans Details page.

How the 30-day window works

Transformations and bandwidth are measured over a rolling 30-day window, not a monthly calendar reset. Your usage reflects the last 30 days of activity at any given moment. As each day passes, the oldest day drops off and the current day is added.

This means:

• Your usage can go up or down every day
• It never resets to zero at the start of a calendar month
• A one-off spike naturally ages out of the window after 30 days without any action on your part

Storage works differently. It reflects your current total at any moment, not a rolling calculation. Deleting assets reduces your storage usage immediately.

Example for a free plan user (25 credits)

Suppose on Day 1 you run a large batch job that uses 10 credits of transformations. Those 10 credits count toward your usage every day for the next 30 days. On Day 31, that batch drops out of the window and your usage falls by 10 credits.

You can see your current credit usage and breakdowns in the Dashboard of the Console.

If you find you're approaching the upper limit of your current plan, you can upgrade to another self-service plan from the Plans Details page in Console Settings.

To upgrade to an Enterprise plan (or if you have any other questions about upgrading), contact our Enterprise support and sales team.