Cloudinary alternative
The Cloudinary alternative, billed by the gigabyte
Cloudinary bundles storage, bandwidth and transformations into one monthly credit pool, and video transforms burn credits by the second of output — so the cost of a growing video catalog gets hard to predict. rehelios bills plainly: per GB stored and per GB delivered, with free encoding. You still get adaptive HLS and MPEG-DASH, signed playback, and a REST API — without doing credit math to forecast a bill.
- Per-GB billing
- Free encoding
- Signed playback
- CLI + MCP server
rehelios vs Cloudinary, side by side
Cloudinary billing model: One monthly credit pool (≈1 credit per GB stored or delivered; video transforms metered per second of output).
| Capability | rehelios | Cloudinary |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Per GB | Credits |
| Storage | $0.02 / GB·mo | ≈1 credit / GB |
| Delivery | $0.005 / GB | ≈1 credit / GB |
| Encoding fees | Free | Metered per second |
| Adaptive HLS | Yes | Yes |
| MPEG-DASH output | Yes | Yes |
| Signed / token playback | Yes | Yes (Advanced tier+) |
| Domain-allowlist playback | Yes (Bunny-style) | Yes |
| REST API + webhooks | Yes | Yes |
| CLI + MCP server for agents | Yes | No |
| Self-serve, no sales call | Yes | Yes |
Rates and plan limits as published by each provider, as of mid-2026. They change — verify on each provider's site.
Why teams switch to rehelios
- Transparent per-GB pricing instead of a shared credit pool spanning storage, bandwidth and transforms.
- Free encoding — Cloudinary meters video transforms per second of output against your credits.
- Signed and expiring playback on every account, not gated to a higher tier.
- An agent-native CLI + MCP server so an AI agent can upload, import and embed video on its own.
When Cloudinary is the better choice
Cloudinary is worth it when you need heavy on-the-fly media manipulation and a single image + video DAM under one API, not just video storage and delivery.
For AI agents
rehelios ships a CLI and an MCP server in one npm package, so an agent evaluating a Cloudinary alternative can put video live itself — no dashboard:
npx @rehelios/cli upload ./demo.mp4 --wait # → embed URL