Hosted image delivery (CDN) in RGE Studio
Beefree App is now RGE Studio!
The email design suite you already know and love just leveled up. We’re working hard to update our help center, but you still may see some references to the old product name.
This article applies to all plans. However, some features may be limited or unavailable on the Starter plan.
For Professional, Business, and Enterprise subscribers: Charges may apply. Please read carefully. Your RGE Studio subscription may include charges for image delivery traffic. This applies if you are hosting your images (or other file types, such as videos and PDFs) within RGE Studio. Each plan has an allotted amount of data transfer that is included. Additional traffic is $0.0001 per Megabyte (MB). See below for more pricing details.
Storage vs. Delivery of Hosted Images
When you export content from your RGE Studio account, you have several options:
- Integrations (connectors), to push the email directly to a sending or marketing platform, such as Mailchimp, SendGrid, Gmail, etc.
- Get the HTML code, to copy or download the HTML and use it anywhere.
- Download HTML and Images, to download a ZIP file including the HTML and a separate folder for the image files.
- Download PDF, to download a PDF version of the email or page design.*
- Copy or open the Preview URL of your design to easily share your email or page with others.*
*Paid plans only
Keeping images hosted at RGE Studio and copying or downloading the HTML source code can make things easier when importing an email or a page into another system, especially when that system does not allow you to import a ZIP file.
To further clarify, when you use the Get the HTML code export option, the Integrations export option, or the Preview URL, the images in your design will be kept online in your RGE Studio account. The HTML of the email or page will link to them.
In that scenario, RGE Studio will not only store images for you but also deliver them to your email recipients/visitors when the email or landing page is opened.
Data transfer usage applies to anything uploaded to the RGE Studio file manager. This article focuses on images because it's the most common type of data transfer.
- There are no charges for storing files in RGE Studio
- There may be charges for delivering files, as explained on this page.
Exclusions: the above excludes "external" images, i.e., images hosted elsewhere and for which you entered an external URL in the builder. Default social media icons are also excluded, as they are hosted with RGE Studio, but not as part of the image repository linked to your account.
CDN Image Distribution for Fast Delivery
Images hosted by Beefree are delivered quickly via Amazon Web Services' CloudFront Content Delivery Network. This ensures the best performance independently of the location where your emails or pages are opened, as your images are delivered from the nearest "edge" site.
Calculating CDN Usage
Your data traffic usage depends on the total data transferred during a service period (i.e., how many images are downloaded and how big they are). You can use the following formula to calculate this for your emails and pages:
Total size of images included in an email * Total emails sent * Total open rate
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Total size of images included in a page * Total page viewsAn example
For instance, if you sent a newsletter with 10 images that are 50KB each, and delivered it to 50,000 people, with a total open rate of 30%, you would have:
50KB * 10 * 50,000 * 30% = 7,500,000KBKeep in mind that hosted image delivery prices are measured in MBs for billing purposes. In order to calculate the MBs, divide the amount of KBs by 1024. If you need to calculate the GB, you'll need to divide the MBs total by 1024 again.
Continuing on the example above, here we've converted the total KBs to MBs:
7,500,000KB / 1024 = 7,324.22MBAnd here we've converted the above MBs total to GBs by continuing to divide by 1024:
7,324.22MB / 1024 = 7.15GBIncluded traffic
Your subscription includes the following data transfer allowance, per month.
- Starter plan: 20GB
- Professional plan: 250GB
- Business plan: 1TB
- Enterprise plan: Custom
Additional traffic
Data overages are handled according to whether you're using a paid plan. Let's take a look.
If you're looking for information about how to reduce your data transfer to prevent an overage, we recommend this Kinsta blog post: https://kinsta.com/blog/optimize-images-for-web/.
Paid Plans
Data transferred in excess of the monthly allotment will be charged at the end of the billing period at a rate of $0.0001 per MB transferred in that billing period.
Continuing on the example above, let's assume that this customer is on the Professional plan (250GB allotment) and that 50 such email campaigns were sent in a month. At the end of the month, the total data transferred would be:
7.15 * 50 = 357.5GB250GB of that traffic would be included free of charge in your plan. Given the overage, you'll need to convert the total data transferred back to MB if you are looking to calculate this manually. Here's how the overage would be calculated in this example:
357.5GB - 250GB = 107.5GB
107.5GB * 1024 = 110,080MB
110,080MB * $0.0001 = $11.01The data transferred amount resets at the beginning of each billing period.
Starter Plans
Starter plans are allowed 20 GB of data transfer per month, but they aren't permitted overages. If a Starter account exceeds their allowance, the subscription locks automatically. To unlock the account, you must upgrade to the Professional plan for at least one month.
Starter plans can track their CDN usage on the Subscription page. Although you have no billing periods on a Starter plan, we still track CDN usage on a monthly basis. As a result, your allowance resets every month.
Overage Notifications
We provide notifications when the following data transfer thresholds are reached:
- 25% (Starter plans)
- 50% (Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans)
- 100% (All plans)
CDN Overage notifications populate for the account owner in the notification center. For paid accounts, we'll also provide an email notification to both the account owner and any associated billing email addresses.
If you're using a paid plan, your subscription will incur overage charges after reaching the 100% threshold.
If you're on the Starter plan and your data transfer greatly exceeds your monthly allowance, your account may be blocked. If your account is blocked due to CDN overage, you'll receive the message below upon login. To unlock your account, you must purchase at least one month on the Professional plan. Please note that your account will not automatically be reopened when the billing period resets. 
Account Cancellation and Image Hosting and Delivery
Image hosting and delivery on Beefree require an active subscription to the service. If you cancel your subscription, hosted images will no longer be accessible once the subscription status changes to "Cancelled" at the end of the current billing period.
If you plan to cancel your subscription, make sure to download emails and pages using the Download HTML and images export option, so future email campaigns are not affected.
For emails already sent prior to the account cancellation or pages already shared, images will be available until the end of the current billing period. After that, the hosted images will no longer be accessible.
If you're concerned about losing your images, you might consider downgrading to the Starter plan instead of cancelling your account entirely. Your images will remain available if you downgrade. In this case, we recommend checking your data usage before downgrading. If you are regularly exceeding 20 GB of traffic per month, you may want to optimize your images to avoid an overage and potential account blocking.
In-app CDN Report
You can reference the in-app CDN report to learn more about your CDN traffic, usage, and charges. For more information, please refer to our dedicated help center article, In-App CDN Report.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
Comments
13 comments
this is wonderful news! can you outline what the rate will be for those who exceed 10GB of traffic? Is it a per GB surcharge?
Great (and needed!) featured. I was using Mosaic.io until now and thinking about BeePro in this moment, because of wider emails.
I needed the feature as I'm using Mautic as my main email platform with all my clients.
@Steven sorry for the late reply. For some reason we weren't notified when this came through. The rate for images delivered in excess of 10GB will be charged $0.10 per GB of data transferred. The total is computed and charged at the end of the billing period.
@alejandro: great to hear that this feature makes things easier for you when using BEE Pro as an email template builder for Mautic.
How are we able to see how much bandwidth we have used for images that are kept online?
Is there a way to move images from one folder to another without having to re upload them to a different folder; the ability to organize images even after they are uploaded would be helpful
Hi Steven, to answer your two questions:
(1) Data transferred to-date: it's something that we will soon add to the BEE Pro subscription profile page. For now you can submit a support ticket and we'll get back to you.
(2) Moving images: it's not there for a reason: if you moved an image and there were a link to that image in an email (or web page), that image link would be broken.
Just a reminder that starting today billing statements will include charges for Hosted Image Delivery when total delivered traffic in the previous billing period exceeded 10GB (the first 10GB of delivered image traffic is free). See above for all the details.
Are the social icons that come with the BEE platform builder included in this? Because I am unable to set manual image sources for them inside the builder.
Hi Nadja, the social icons are not part of the image repository linked to your account, so the traffic is not included in your data transfer consumption.
If the email is shared by someone, are we paying for that too?
Hi Angela, thanks for your request. My colleague replied to you on a ticket. Hope it helped. Cheers.
Will deleting old eblasts help to cut down on hosted image fees?
Hi there, thanks for sharing your question with the Beefree community!
As long as your emails that include designs with images hosted with Beefree are getting opened by recipients (and as a result, the images are getting downloaded), this will continue to count towards your CDN usage. To stop this, you would have to delete the images from the Beefree file manager (Library), but please note that this type of deletion would also mean that the images would no longer be displayed for your recipients in your email campaigns.
Deleting the email designs from Beefree will not affect your image hosting fees; you have to delete the images directly in the file manager.
For more suggestions on how to optimize your images and campaigns in the future, we recommend checking out the resource here: https://kinsta.com/blog/optimize-images-for-web/.
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