Hosted image delivery in Beefree
BEE Pro becomes Beefree
We're still the same design suite you know and love, just with a new name. Our team is working hard to update our documentation, but you might still see some information or screenshots that are out of date.
This article applies to all plans. However, some features may be limited or unavailable on the Free plan.
For Team 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 free. 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.
*Team and Enterprise 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.
- Free plan: 50GB
- Team plan: 250GB
- Enterprise plan: 2TB
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/.
Team and Enterprise 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 Team 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.
Free Plans
If you're using a Free account, we do not allow data overages. Free users can also track their CDN usage on the My subscription page. Although you have no billing periods on a Free 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% (Team & 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 Team or Enterprise, your subscription will incur overage charges after reaching the 100% threshold.
If you're on the Free 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 Team plan. 
Billing statements
This feature is not available in the Free plan.
Any charges for image data transferred during the previous billing period will be visible on your Beefree billing statements (see: Statements area) 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 your monthly allowance.
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 Team customer accumulated a total of 295,375 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:
39375 MBs * $0.0001 = $3.94
Account Cancellation and Image Hosting and Delivery
Image hosting and delivery on Beefree 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 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 Free 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 50 GB of traffic per month, you may want to optimize your images to avoid an overage.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Comments
11 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.
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