You never need to move your images.
Our service has been designed from the ground up to work directly with your images wherever they currently live. We never require you to import, upload, or transfer your images to make use of our service. Whether you meticulously organize your image buckets or you have one large catch-all image bucket, we will help you make sense of your images and make them available for serving to your users as you need, without ever having to relocate them to us. In fact, we actively encourage you to keep your original, high-resolution images in your bucket and let us dynamically render whatever images you may need from them, on-demand.
Several other services require you to store your images on their servers in order to make use of their services and as part of locking you in. Some of them even advertise that you can “bring your own bucket”, but that is simply another way of saying that you can (and sometimes have to) import your images into their system.
Your images are always the authority.
Your image bucket or buckets are always the authoritative source of your images. If you make changes to your original images, such as deleting or replacing an image in your bucket, we will reflect these changes in our systems without you having to do anything. If you want your changes to take effect immediately, we offer tools to purge any out-of-date image content so that the new content goes live right away.
Since some other services require you to store your images with them, any changes you make in your original image bucket will not be reflected in their systems, thus making it easy for the two systems to drift apart.
This is not ImageMagick on EC2.
Everyone’s first thought is to build out their image infrastructure themselves. That usually means using legacy imaging technologies that were never meant to scale and then shoe-horning them into cloud service providers so that they can be horizontally scaled. However, before you know it, you are spending exorbitant amounts on your cloud bills, the technology starts to break down in ways you never anticipated, upgrading it become a nightmare, and finding the right code to fix or the right people to fix it gets harder and harder. Worst of all, this is the path many image service providers have chosen to double down on and then simply pass the costs on to you.
We understand that building a highly scalable, reliable image service takes the best technologies, the best infrastructure, and the best engineers to get right. Even then, it is a delicate balance of features, costs, and performance before everything works the way it needs to. This is why we invest heavily into our own rendering pipelines and leverage the best technology partners in the industry to ensure that we can provide you the best possible products at the lowest costs.
Use anywhere, integrate everywhere.
We built imgix using the simplest and most time-tested web standards, maximizing where and how our service can be used by our customers. Our URL-based image rendering API uses query string parameters to control and transform the output image, which is how the URL specification originally intended requests like these to behave. The result is a powerful and elegant solution for embedding images into your websites or apps. It is as simple as providing an imgix URL directly in the 'src' attribute of an <img> tag.
For more advanced control over your service, we provide JSON APIs that you can integrate into your website, applications, and tools. Or, you can leverage one of our many client libraries and integrations to take care of the heavy lifting for you, empowering you to get up and running even faster. Our SDK team is continuously adding new libraries, integrations, and tools to help ensure that imgix can be easily integrated into any stack.
We can save you money and make you money.
Getting your images right is incredibly important to your business. Achieving the best compression levels and file formats, while maintaining the highest quality images, will reduce the amount of money you spend on every request your users make. Better optimized images, delivered closer to your end users via CDN, will result in faster page loads which is well-known to increase conversion rates, time on site, and engagement. Not having to build or run this kind of infrastructure yourself means you can direct your engineering talents in other areas or reduce your overall engineering needs. By using imgix, you get all of these benefits without having to become an expert in digital imaging yourself. Our goal is to empower your images to amplify your business, not cost it.
Predictable pricing.
Per-image, per-month pricing means that we only count your “origin” image, once per month, if it is accessed by us to manage or deliver that image in some form. That means you have unlimited rendering so that you can render out any size, shape, format, or quality as many times as you like at no extra cost. Fine tune your images as often as you like and be protected from unexpectedly incurring additional rendering costs, such as when a new device enters the market that requests a whole new set of image sizes. Our pricing model is designed to help you get the most out of your images without having to worry about micromanaging your usage.
Additionally, we charge you for the bandwidth required to serve your images, and have found that the flexibility our image pricing model actually enables our customers to use less bandwidth because they are serving the perfect image down the wire every time.
Our pricing scales with you… up and down.
Other services make it easy for you to scale up, but difficult for you to scale down. Whenever you render an image in their systems, it gets added to your pile and it continues to cost you money until you go in and delete it manually. By the time you realize this, you may have lost track of whether or not you are even using these images anymore. Without actively monitoring and curating your accumulated images, your costs begin to grow exponentially and then you are stuck with a large bill.
We designed our pricing model to scale both up and down with your usage. We only bill you for the images that are actively being used by you or viewed by your users in a given month. If an image stops being accessed, it stops costing you money. When you use imgix, you never have to worry about an orphaned, unused set of images contributing to your bill forever.
We are the most experienced in the business.
For over ten years, we have been building imgix into the service that it is today. And even before that, many members of our team worked on the biggest web properties in the world, including Google, Apple, YouTube, Yahoo, Netflix, Yelp, and many more. We have seen huge scale both inside and outside of our company, the kind of scale few people ever get a chance to work on. We have seen it all before. This is why we’re trusted to serve the images on over 27 million websites, including several of the Alexa Top 10 websites and many of the Alexa Top 1000. It takes experience to process and deliver hundreds of thousands of images per second with over 99.9% uptime, and we have that experience.
We are reliable and transparent.
Your business matters to us and we recognize that keeping our service up is critical to your business. Of the last one trillion images we have served, we have successfully delivered 99.9992% of them, meaning that fewer than eight out of every one million images served is an error. That being said, sometimes things do go wrong. When they do, we want you to know about it first so that you can respond accordingly. That is why we actively update our status page for even the slightest disruptions, why we have 24-hour support coverage, and why we provide detailed public post-mortems for any event that directly impacts customers. We recognize that past performance is not a guarantee for future success, so we invest heavily in building reliable infrastructure, enforcing best practices, and honing our team’s response times.