Hosted image delivery in BEE Pro

In this document: 

• Storage vs. delivery of hosted images
• CDN image distribution for fast delivery
• Pricing
• Checking consumed traffic to date
• Out of BETA transition
• Billing statements
• Account cancellation and image hosting

Storage vs. delivery of hosted images

When you export a message from your BEE Pro account, you have three options:

1. Download a ZIP file that contains the HTML of the email and the images used in it.
2. Download just the HTML, while the images stay in BEE Pro
3. Push the message to another application, such as MailChimp, SendGrid, MailUp, etc.

These last two options make things easier when importing a message into another system, especially when this system does not allow you to import a ZIP file or when an API is used to transfer the message to another application.

To further clarify, when you use the Keep my images online feature or the Export to ESP feature, images will not be downloaded with the HTML, but rather kept online in your BEE Pro account. The HTML of the message will link to them.

In that scenario BEE Pro will not only store images for you, but also deliver them to your email recipients when the email is opened (or when a page is rendered, if you are using BEE to build landing pages).

• There are no charges for storing images in BEE Pro
• There may be charges for delivering images, as explained on this page.

Exclusions: the above excludes "external" images, i.e. images hosted elsewhere and for which you entered an external URL in the editor. Default social media icons are also excluded, as they are not part of the image repository linked to your account.

CDN image distribution for fast delivery

Images hosted by BEE Pro will be delivered quickly via Amazon Web Services' CloudFront Content Delivery Network. This ensures the best performance independently of the location where your messages are opened, as your images are delivered from the nearest "edge" site.

Pricing

The cost of having your images delivered via the CloudFront CDN depends on the total data transferred during a billing period (i.e. how many images are downloaded and how big they are). For email messages, this is calculated as:

Total size of images included in a message * Total messages sent * Total open rate

An example

For instance, if you sent a newsletter with 10 images that are 50KB each, and delivered it to 25,000 people, with a total open rate of 30%, you would have:

50KB * 10 * 25,000 * 30% = 3.75GB

... of total image data transferred.

Included traffic

Your subscription includes 10GB per month of free data.

Additional traffic

Data transferred in excess of 10GB per month will be charged at the end of the billing period at a rate of $0.10 per GB transferred in that billing period. 

Continuing on the example above, let's assume that 10 such email campaigns were sent in a month. At the end of the month, the total data transferred would be:

3.75 * 10 = 37.5GB

10GB of that traffic would be included free of charge in your plan. The remaining would be billed as follows:

(37.5 - 10) * 0.10 = $2.75

The data transferred amount resets at the beginning of each billing period.

Checking consumed traffic to date

You can view your current hosted image traffic by navigating to My subscription > Payment details in your BEE Pro account. You will see the line item CDN Data Traffic - Hosted Images, expressed in MBs (for technical reasons we have to use MBs, sorry!). Divide by 1,000 to get to GBs.

In the example shown above, the customer used ~73GB in the billing period. The first 10GB are free, and the remaining amount charged at $0.10 per GB. Let's assume that it is the end of the billing period and the customer's subscription is being charged:

(73 - 10) * $0.10 = $6.30

... will be added to the customer's subscription payment.

Out of BETA transition

As mentioned above, this feature recently transitioned to "out of beta" status after several months of BETA status in which no charges were applied. Specifically:

• We are now charging for traffic generated when a hosted image is delivered, which happens when an email is opened or when a Web page is rendered.
• We charge for traffic that exceeds 10GB of hosted images delivered in a billing period. That is: 10GB of hosted image traffic is included free of charge in each billing period.
• The charge is $0.10 per GB over the included amount.
• The charge is automatically applied to the subscription at the end of the billing period.
• Charges start on Sep 1, 2017 for hosted images delivered over the previous billing period
• This means that image traffic starting Aug 1, 2017 has been counted into the total traffic calculation

Billing statements

Any charges for image data transferred during the previous billing period will be visible on your BEE Pro billing statements as a new line item named "CDN Data Transfer - Hosted Images".

The amount of data transferred is expressed in megabytes (MBs) on the statement. So it needs to be divided by 1,000 to be translated into gigabytes (GBs).

For example, in the statement below the BEE Pro customer accumulated a total of ~5645 MBs of data transferred. This equals ~5.6 GBs, which is under the 10GB threshold of data transferred that's included free of charge. Therefore, no charges are added to the bill in this case.

Account cancellation and image hosting & delivery

Image hosting and delivery on BEE Pro requires an active subscription to the service. When a subscription is cancelled, images will no longer be accessible once the subscription status changes to "Cancelled" at the end of the current billing period.

If you plan to cancel your subscription, make sure to download messages using the "Download message zip" feature, so future email campaigns are not affected.

If a message has already been sent and your subscription is cancelled, images will continue to be delivered until the end of the current billing period. After that, those messages will be viewed without images as the images will no longer be accessible.