Hosted image delivery in Beefree
This article applies to all plans. However, some features may be limited or unavailable on the Starter plan.
For Professional, Business, and Enterprise subscribers: Charges may apply. Please read carefully. Your Beefree subscription may include charges for image delivery traffic. This applies if you are hosting your images within Beefree. Each plan has an allotted amount of hosted image data transfer that is included. Additional traffic is $0.0001 per Megabyte (MB). See below for more pricing details.
Storage vs. Delivery of Hosted Images
When you export content from your Beefree account, you have several options:
- Get HTML & Images, to download a ZIP file including two separate folders for the HTML and image files.
- Copy the HTML hosted at Beefree, so that you can copy the HTML and use it anywhere.
- Push to your sending system, to push the email to a sending or marketing platform, such as Mailchimp, SendGrid, MailUp, etc.
- Download a PDF version of the email or page.*
- Share your page or email.
*Paid plans only
Keeping images hosted at Beefree and copying the HTML source code can make things easier when importing an email or a page into another system, especially when that system does not allow you to import a ZIP file.
To further clarify, when you use the Copy the HTML feature, the Push to your sending system feature, or the Share feature (for Pages), images will not be downloaded with the HTML, but rather kept online in your Beefree account. The HTML of the email or page will link to them.
In that scenario, Beefree will not only store images for you but also deliver them to your email recipients/visitors when the email or landing page is opened.
- There are no charges for storing images in Beefree
- 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 builder. 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 Beefree are delivered quickly via Amazon Web Services' CloudFront Content Delivery Network. This ensures the best performance independently of the location where your emails or pages are opened, as your images are delivered from the nearest "edge" site.
Calculating CDN Usage
Your data traffic usage depends on the total data transferred during a service period (i.e. how many images are downloaded and how big they are). You can use the following formula to calculate this for your emails and pages:
Total size of images included in an email * Total emails sent * Total open rate
+
Total size of images included in a page * Total page views
An example
For instance, if you sent a newsletter with 10 images that are 50KB each, and delivered it to 50,000 people, with a total open rate of 30%, you would have:
50KB * 10 * 50,000 * 30% = 7,500,000KB
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 KBs 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:
7,500,000KB / 1024 = 7,324.22MB
And here we've converted the above MBs total to GBs by continuing to divide by 1024:
7,324.22MB / 1024 = 7.15GB
Included traffic
Your subscription includes the following data transfer allowance, per month.
- Starter plan: 20GB
- Professional plan: 250GB
- Business plan: 1TB
- Enterprise plan: Custom
Additional traffic
Data overages are handled according to whether or not you're using a paid plan. Let's take a look.
If you're looking for information about how to reduce your data transfer to prevent an overage, we recommend this Kinsta blog post: https://kinsta.com/blog/optimize-images-for-web/.
Paid Plans
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 Professional plan (250GB allotment) and that 50 such email campaigns were sent in a month. At the end of the month, the total data transferred would be:
7.15 * 50 = 357.5GB
250GB 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:
357.5GB - 250GB = 107.5GB
107.5GB * 1024 = 110,080MB
110,080MB * $0.0001 = $11.01
The data transferred amount resets at the beginning of each billing period.
Starter Plans
If you're using a Starter account, we do not allow data overages. Starter plans can track their CDN usage on the My Subscription page. Although you have no billing periods on a Starter plan, we still track CDN usage on a monthly basis. As a result, your allowance resets every month.
Overage Notifications
We provide notifications when the following data transfer thresholds are reached:
- 25% (Free plans)
- 50% (Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans)
- 100% (All plans)
CDN Overage notifications populate for the account owner in the notification center. For paid accounts, we'll also provide an email notification to both the account owner and any associated billing email addresses.
If you're using a paid plan, your subscription will incur overage charges after reaching the 100% threshold.
If you're on the Starter plan and your data transfer greatly exceeds your monthly allowance, your account may be blocked. If your account is blocked due to CDN overage, you'll receive the message below upon login. In order to unlock your account, you must purchase at least one month on the Professional plan. 
Account Cancellation and Image Hosting and Delivery
Image hosting and delivery on Beefree require 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 emails and pages using the Get HTML & images feature, so future email campaigns are not affected.
For emails already sent prior to the account cancellation or pages already shared, images will be available until the end of the current billing period. After that, the hosted images will no longer be accessible.
If you're concerned about losing your images, you might consider downgrading to the Starter plan instead. All of your images will remain available if you downgrade. In this case, we recommend checking your data usage before downgrading. If you are regularly exceeding 20 GB of traffic per month, you may want to optimize your images to avoid an overage.
In-app CDN Report
You can reference the in-app CDN report to learn more about your traffic, usage, and charges.
Prior to accessing the in-app CDN report, ensure you have the following:
- The role of Owner for the Beefree account
- A paid Beefree plan (Professional, Business, Enterprise)
The CDN report enables you to perform the following:
This section will discuss how to navigate the new in-app CDN report, and how to fully take advantage of these three features.
View usage at a glance
You can view your CDN usage at a glance inside the Beefree application.
To view your usage, take the following steps:
- Log in to your Beefree account.
- Navigate to the organization you are the Owner of.
- Select your profile in the upper right-hand corner of the screen to open the drop-down menu.
- Click Subscription in the drop-down menu.
You will be redirected to the Overview page. From there, you can select the Recurring & usage-based fees tab. In this tab, you see the following graph displaying your CDN usage.
Click the bars inside the interactive graph
You can click the daily bars inside the interactive graph to view more information.
The following information is available for reference when you select a bar inside the graph:
- Date
- Daily usage
- Total usage
- Information icon
Click on one of the bars inside the graph to access a report detailing the top 10 resources used on that day. This report will provide you with additional information on the images that generated the most amount of CDN usage for that corresponding day.
The following image provides an example of how to click on the interactive graph.
Download CDN Reports
After you click on one of the bars inside of the interactive graph, Beefree will begin preparing your report. You can continue using Beefree while the report downloads. This process could take longer than 30 seconds. Once the report is ready, it will be available for reference when you return to this section.
The report has three sections:
- File name: Name of the file in the File manager.
- Used data traffic: CDN usage for the file.
- File physical path: A link to the workspace File manager where the file exists. Note that workspace information is not available at a glance.
The following image provides an example of a top 10 resources report.
Additional considerations
When using and downloading the CDN report, consider the following:
- The report is updated daily and the data is cached for 30 days.
- Reports could take longer than 30 seconds to download. You can continue using the Beefree app while the report downloads.
- Once the report is available, you will see it when you return to the CDN usage section of the app. You will not receive a notification when the report is ready.
- The cadence for in-app notifications remains the same. You will receive a notification when you reach 25%, 50%, and 100% of monthly traffic.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Comments
13 comments
this is wonderful news! can you outline what the rate will be for those who exceed 10GB of traffic? Is it a per GB surcharge?
Great (and needed!) featured. I was using Mosaic.io until now and thinking about BeePro in this moment, because of wider emails.
I needed the feature as I'm using Mautic as my main email platform with all my clients.
@Steven sorry for the late reply. For some reason we weren't notified when this came through. The rate for images delivered in excess of 10GB will be charged $0.10 per GB of data transferred. The total is computed and charged at the end of the billing period.
@alejandro: great to hear that this feature makes things easier for you when using BEE Pro as an email template builder for Mautic.
How are we able to see how much bandwidth we have used for images that are kept online?
Is there a way to move images from one folder to another without having to re upload them to a different folder; the ability to organize images even after they are uploaded would be helpful
Hi Steven, to answer your two questions:
(1) Data transferred to-date: it's something that we will soon add to the BEE Pro subscription profile page. For now you can submit a support ticket and we'll get back to you.
(2) Moving images: it's not there for a reason: if you moved an image and there were a link to that image in an email (or web page), that image link would be broken.
Just a reminder that starting today billing statements will include charges for Hosted Image Delivery when total delivered traffic in the previous billing period exceeded 10GB (the first 10GB of delivered image traffic is free). See above for all the details.
Are the social icons that come with the BEE platform builder included in this? Because I am unable to set manual image sources for them inside the builder.
Hi Nadja, the social icons are not part of the image repository linked to your account, so the traffic is not included in your data transfer consumption.
If the email is shared by someone, are we paying for that too?
Hi Angela, thanks for your request. My colleague replied to you on a ticket. Hope it helped. Cheers.
Will deleting old eblasts help to cut down on hosted image fees?
Hi there, thanks for sharing your question with the Beefree community!
As long as your emails that include designs with images hosted with Beefree are getting opened by recipients (and as a result, the images are getting downloaded), this will continue to count towards your CDN usage. To stop this, you would have to delete the images from the Beefree file manager (Library), but please note that this type of deletion would also mean that the images would no longer be displayed for your recipients in your email campaigns.
Deleting the email designs from Beefree will not affect your image hosting fees; you have to delete the images directly in the file manager.
For more suggestions on how to optimize your images and campaigns in the future, we recommend checking out the resource here: https://kinsta.com/blog/optimize-images-for-web/.
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