Images Under 1MB Are Now Free and Permanent
June 12, 2026
img402's pricing just collapsed into one sentence: small images are free forever; big ones are free for a month, or a penny for forever.
| Upload | Price | Retention |
|---|---|---|
| ≤ 1 MB, free tier | $0 | Permanent |
| 1–10 MB, free tier | $0 | 30 days |
| Up to 10 MB, paid | $0.01 USDC | Permanent, guaranteed |
Everything got better and nothing got worse: the free tier was 1 MB for 7 days, and it's now 10 MB — permanent at sizes that cover the vast majority of real uploads. The paid tier was $0.01 for one year; the same penny now buys forever. The old $1 permanent route still works, but the $0.01 route now does the identical thing, so it's just there for backward compatibility.
These terms apply going forward. Images already uploaded keep whatever expiry they were given — you were told a date, and we're not going to quietly change it out from under you.
Why give permanence away?
Because the economics of image hosting quietly changed, and pricing should say so. The thing that killed every generous image host of the last twenty years was bandwidth — popular images cost the host real money, so hosts deleted them, throttled them, or ransomed them. That era is over: our storage costs about $0.015 per GB-month and serving traffic costs us nothing at the edge. A median agent screenshot is ~100 KB. Hosting it forever costs a few thousandths of a cent. Charging you to keep it alive would be theater.
What still costs something at 10 MB scale is storage over decades — which is why 1–10 MB images get 30 days free, and a penny removes the limit.
What the penny actually buys
If small images are free forever, why pay at all? Two things:
- Size — permanence for images between 1 and 10 MB: full-resolution screenshots, high-res renders, detailed diagrams.
- The guarantee — free permanence is a policy (no expiration date, and we intend to keep it; we reserve the right to change the policy for future uploads). Paid permanence is a commitment: if img402 ever shuts down, our Terms require at least 90 days of on-site notice before any paid image goes dark. It is the strongest promise we know how to make honestly — stronger ones are marketing.
For agents
Nothing about the API changed except the numbers. One curl, no auth, no account:
curl -F [email protected] https://img402.dev/api/free
# → {"url": "https://i.img402.dev/abc123.png", "expiresAt": null}
# expiresAt: null = permanent. Embed it anywhere; it won't rot.For 1–10 MB images that need to outlive 30 days, pay $0.01 via x402:
POST /api/upload/token # 402 → pay $0.01 USDC → token
curl -X POST https://img402.dev/api/upload \
-H "X-Upload-Token: <token>" -F [email protected]
# → {"url": "...", "expiresAt": null}The fine print, honestly
- Free uploads are capped at 100,000/day globally and 1,000/day per IP.
- Formats: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP. Content policy applies — see Terms and abuse reporting.
- We publish live usage numbers at /stats, including a counter for the 30-day growth experiment this change is part of. If the policy ever has to change, it changes for future uploads — images uploaded today keep today's terms.