Pricing

img402 is an image hosting API with two tiers. No accounts, no API keys, no billing dashboard.

	Free	Paid
Price	$0	$0.01 USDC
Endpoint	`/api/free`	`/api/upload/token`
Max file size	1 MB	5 MB
Retention	7 days	1 year
Auth	None	x402 payment
Formats	PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP
CDN	Cloudflare (global edge caching)

Why pay $0.01?

The free tier is good for trying things out. The paid tier is for anything you want to keep:

5x file size — 5 MB vs 1 MB. Room for full screenshots, diagrams, and high-res images.
52x retention — 1 year vs 7 days. Links stay alive in PRs, docs, and READMEs.
Idempotent — Same payment always returns the same result. Safe to retry on network errors.

At $0.01 per upload, 10 screenshots in a PR costs $0.10. A month of heavy usage might be $5.

How payment works

img402 uses x402, an open protocol for HTTP-native payments. There are no accounts to create and no API keys to manage. Payment is authentication.

Request a token from POST /api/upload/token — the server responds 402 with payment instructions
Your client pays $0.01 USDC on Base and retries — the server returns a single-use upload token
Upload your image to POST /api/upload with the token in the X-Upload-Token header

x402-compatible clients (like the Payments MCP tool) handle steps 1-2 automatically. From your perspective, it's one HTTP call for the token, then a curl to upload the file.

Full example
# Step 1: Pay for a token (x402 handles payment)
POST /api/upload/token
# → {"token": "a1b2c3...", "expiresAt": "..."}

# Step 2: Upload with the token
curl -X POST https://img402.dev/api/upload \
  -H "X-Upload-Token: a1b2c3..." \
  -F [email protected]
# → {"url": "https://i.img402.dev/abc123.png"}

Try it now

No wallet needed. Upload an image right now:

bash

curl -F [email protected] https://img402.dev/api/free

See the API docs for full endpoint reference, error codes, and integration examples.