How we make money
By not paying for your bandwidth
Most upload services charge a lot because they're paying for:
- Storage (your files sit on their servers)
- Bandwidth (every download costs them money)
- CDN (global distribution isn't free)
- Server CPU (proxying files takes resources)
We pay for none of that. Your files go from your browser directly to your R2/Vercel/Supabase account. We generate signed URLs, track requests in Redis, and log analytics.
At 100 Pro users ($24 each), we're making $2,400/month with $0 infrastructure cost. That's a 100% profit margin. Even after upgrading to paid tiers at scale, margins stay above 98%.
By charging for convenience, not storage
You're not paying us to host files. You're paying for:
- One API that works with 5 providers (more coming)
- Security that took 4 weeks to build (rate limiting, abuse prevention, email verification)
- Batch operations (100 files in 1 API call vs 100 separate requests)
- JWT tokens for access control without exposing storage URLs
- Analytics dashboard (who uploaded what, when, success rates)
- Not having to wire this together yourself (3 weeks of work, minimum)
Free tier: 1,000 requests/month (~300 uploads). Good for testing, not production.
Pro tier: $24/month for 50,000 requests (~15,000 uploads). Cloudinary charges $99/month and starts counting GBs.
Enterprise: Custom pricing because you're probably hitting 10M+ requests and need dedicated support.
The numbers (with receipts)
Scenario 1: 100 Pro users
Revenue: $2,400/month
Infrastructure: $0 (free tier)
Profit: $2,400 (100% margin)
Scenario 2: 500 users (mix of Free/Pro/Enterprise)
Revenue: ~$7,000/month
Infrastructure: ~$80/month (Cloudflare paid: $25, Supabase Pro: $25, Redis: $10, monitoring: $20)
Profit: $6,920 (98.9% margin)
Scenario 3: 5,000 users
Revenue: ~$60,000/month
Infrastructure: ~$500/month (still cheap at scale)
Profit: $59,500 (99.2% margin)
Why can we maintain 98%+ margins? Because we're not a CDN.We're an API that generates URLs and tracks requests. Cloudflare Workers scale incredibly cheap: $5 base + $0.50 per million extra requests.
Why so cheap compared to competitors?
Cloudinary: $99/month minimum (11× our Pro plan)
Why? They store your files, deliver via CDN, process images on the fly. That costs real money.
Uploadcare: $25/month for 10GB traffic
Why? They proxy your uploads. Every byte costs them bandwidth.
Vercel Blob: $20/month for 100GB bandwidth
Why? Great DX, but they're a hosting company. Bandwidth is their cost center.
ObitoX: $24/month for 50,000 operations
Why? We don't touch your files. You bring R2 ($0.015/GB), we generate URLs (5-15ms crypto operation). Your bandwidth costs are ~$5-10/month for 1TB. Our costs are API calls (nearly free at scale).
The catch (there's always one)
You manage your own storage credentials. We don't hold your R2/Vercel/Supabase API keys in a dashboard you pass them in each request.
This means:
- More setup (you configure providers yourself)
- More responsibility (you rotate keys, manage buckets)
- More control (no vendor lock-in, you own your data)
If you want a fully managed service where we handle storage too, use Cloudinary. If you want control + low cost, use us.
Growing with you, not off you
Side project uploading 50 files/month? Free tier works.
Startup doing 10,000 uploads/month? $9/month Pro tier.
Scale-up hitting 1M requests/month? Enterprise tier at ~$299-499/month (still cheaper than competitors).
We don't have surprise pricing. Request limits are enforced at runtime (you get a 429 error with upgrade instructions). No overage fees. No "contact sales for a quote." Just predictable tiers you can calculate yourself.
If you outgrow Enterprise, we'll negotiate custom pricing based on your actual usage. But we're not hiding a 10× markup behind "talk to sales."