{"id":21824,"date":"2018-12-12T17:52:31","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T17:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/understanding_cloudinary_s_transformation_quotas"},"modified":"2025-09-26T14:59:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T21:59:32","slug":"understanding_cloudinary_s_transformation_quotas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/understanding_cloudinary_s_transformation_quotas","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Cloudinary\u2019s Transformation Quotas"},"content":{"rendered":"

One main reason people use Cloudinary is to leverage its capabilities for transforming digital assets, such as images<\/a> and videos<\/a>. Whether for optimization or aesthetics, it\u2019s easy and fast to transform digital media for your web or mobile projects.<\/p>\n

Cloudinary\u2019s service plans<\/a> count one credit as 1,000 transformations. However, the many transformation options available can cause confusion on what actions count against a plan\u2019s quota. Since this is a common topic in our support tickets, we wanted to spell out the details here.<\/p>\n

Feel free to watch this accompanying video if you\u2019d prefer to watch instead of read.<\/p>\n

Content Upload<\/h2>\n

Generally, uploading a piece of content counts as a single transformation because Cloudinary must process the image. It\u2019s important to remember that if you\u2019re planning a large migration of images or videos to Cloudinary, such as at the start of your account.<\/p>\n

\"Transformation<\/p>\n

However, you cannot transform \u201craw\u201d files, such as Excel spreadsheets or CSS files. Cloudinary simply stores them instead of processing them as images or videos. Therefore, uploading raw files does not<\/strong> count against your transformation quota..<\/p>\n

\"Raw<\/p>\n

Additionally, files of certain types can result in multiple transformations once you\u2019ve optimized or added effects to them. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n