Are credits charged for each request? How can I mitigate the cost?

socratesclown

Hello,

First things first - thank you for such a lovely service and your help. These tools are taking my personal projs. to higher levels.

Second - I'm wondering about how to mitigate credit usage in a Next.js app.

I have a few images and a video uploaded to the CDN. In the Next app I am using your <CldImage/> and <AdvancedVideo /> tags to render them; however, I can't help but notice how costly these are every time I have a user visit my static site.

I'm thinking it may be a good idea to add a cache layer to my site; however, would you happen to have any other suggestions?

Thanks for the help!

tia

Hi there, 

Thanks so much for reaching out. 

The general idea with Cloudinary is that you should upload your original asset, but you will not actually deliver that original to your end users. You will use Cloudinary to apply transformations to your asset to optimize it and then send that derived version to your end users instead. This is what will save you on bandwidth.

When you do not apply any transformation, Cloudinary delivers the image as is (unoptimized). If you apply any transformation to your images (e.g. width, height, etc), Cloudinary automatically optimizes the image by the industry's best practices, including metadata stripping and more. Furthermore, there are some specific Cloudinary transformations that can further optimize your images, like `f_auto` and `q_auto`. 

Here's a quick video that will get you started - 

https://res.cloudinary.com/orlyborly/video/upload/Training/optimizations3.mp4

For more detailed information, please see - 

http://support.cloudinary.com/hc/en-us/articles/202521522-How-can-I-make-my-images-load-faster-

http://cloudinary.com/documentation/image_optimization

 Please see the following article, which provides some important tips on how to optimize your videos using Cloudinary transformations - https://support.cloudinary.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003021231-How-can-I-optimize-my-videos-.

For more information - https://cloudinary.com/documentation/video_manipulation_and_delivery

I hope this helps. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.

Kind regards, 

Tia