Hosted image delivery in BEE Pro

In this document: 

• Storage vs. delivery of hosted images
• CDN image distribution for fast delivery
• Pricing
• 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 several options:

1. Get messages & images, to download a ZIP file including two separate folders for the HTML and image files.
2. Keep images online hosted at BEE Pro, so that you can copy the HTML and use it anywhere.
3. Export to another application, to push the message to a sending or marketing platform, such as MailChimp, SendGrid, MailUp, etc.
4. Download a PDF version of the message.

Keeping images hosted at BEE Pro and copying the HTML source code can make things easier when importing a message into another system, especially when this system does not allow you to import a ZIP file and a connector to the application is not yet available under Export to another application.

To further clarify, when you use the Keep my images online feature or the Export to another application 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 are 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). You can use the following formula to calculate this for your email messages: 

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% = 3,750,000KB

Keep in mind that hosted image delivery prices are measured in MBs for billing purposes. In order to calculate the MBs, divide the amount of KB by 1024. If you need to calculate the GB, you'll need to divide the MBs total by 1024 again.

Continuing on the example above, here we've converted the total KBs to MBs:

3,750,000KB / 1024 = 3,662.11MB

And here we've converted the above MBs total to GBs by continuing to divide by 1024:

3662.11MB / 1024 = 3.58GB

Included traffic

Your subscription includes the following data transfer allotment, per month.

• Freelancer plan: 10GB
• Team plan: 50GB
• Agency plan: 100GB

So in the example above, all image data traffic would have been covered by the free monthly allotment, under all plans.

Additional traffic

Data transferred in excess of the monthly allotment will be charged at the end of the billing period at a rate of $0.0001 per MB transferred in that billing period. 

Continuing on the example above, let's assume that this customer is on the Freelancer plan (10GB allotment) and that 10 such email campaigns were sent in a month. At the end of the month, the total data transferred would be:

3.58 * 10 = 35.8GB

10GB of that traffic would be included free of charge in your plan. Given the overage, you'll need to convert the total data transferred back to MB if you are looking to calculate this manually. Here's how the overage would be calculated in this example: 

35.8GB - 10GB = 25.8GB
25.8GB * 1024 = 26,419.2MB
26,419.2MB * $0.0001 = $2.64

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

Billing statements

Any charges for image data transferred during the previous billing period will be visible on your BEE Pro billing statements as a line item named "CDN Data Transfer - Hosted Images". You will also see an additional line item named "CDN Data Transfer - Hosted Images -- Overage" for any data transfer over 10 GBs.

The amount of data transferred is expressed in megabytes (MBs) on the statement. So you need to divide the amount shown by 1,024 to be converted into gigabytes (GBs).

For example, in the statement below the BEE Pro customer accumulated a total of 28,485 MBs of data transferred. Since these line items are now separated, you only need to see the overage line item value in order to calculate the cost. 

If you were to manually calculate the cost of the overage according to the above invoice, your math would look like this: 

18245 MBs * $0.0001 = $1.82

Account Cancellation and Image Hosting and Delivery

Image hosting and delivery on BEE Pro requires an active subscription to the service. If you cancel your subscription, hosted 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 Get messages & images feature, so future email campaigns are not affected.

For messages already sent prior to the account cancellation, images will be available until the end of the current billing period. After that, the hosted images in your messages will no longer be accessible.