Cloudinary is a full media CDN — storage, delivery, video, and a huge transformation catalog, on a monthly plan. SammaPix is pay-as-you-go image and PDF processing an AI agent can call over MCP, with no key and zero-retention. They solve different problems.
Choose SammaPix if you…
Choose Cloudinary if you…
| Feature | SammaPix | Cloudinary |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go | $89+/month plan |
| Free tier | 25 ops/day | 25 credits/month |
| Per-operation price | $0.003–0.005 | ~$0.0004* |
| Monthly commitment | ||
| Image processing | ||
| PDF tools (compress/split/merge) | Limited | |
| AI vision (describe/OCR/tags) | Add-on | |
| Pipeline (chain ops in 1 call) | ||
| MCP server for AI agents | ||
| OAuth (no API key to paste) | ||
| Zero-retention (nothing stored) | Stores assets | |
| Hosting / CDN delivery | ||
| Media storage / DAM | ||
| Video processing |
* Cloudinary's per-transform price is lower, but it is pooled with storage and bandwidth and requires a monthly plan (Free 25 credits/mo, Plus ~$89/mo, Advanced ~$224/mo). Prices as of 2026; check each vendor for current rates.
This is the fundamental difference, and we will be plain about it: Cloudinary is a media platform. It stores your assets, serves them from a CDN, transforms them on the fly via URL, handles video, and gives you a digital asset manager. SammaPix is not a CDN and does not host anything. You send a file, it is processed in memory, and you get the result back. If you need to store and deliver images to end users at scale, Cloudinary is the right category of tool. If you need on-demand processing an agent or backend can call, SammaPix is simpler and cheaper to start.
Cloudinary's per-transform price is genuinely low, but you access it through a plan: Free at 25 credits per month, then roughly $89/month and $224/month tiers, with overages on top. For a small project, an occasional workload, or an agent that processes a handful of images a day, that is a commitment you may not want. SammaPix charges per operation from a prepaid credit balance, with a free daily tier and no monthly floor. You pay for what you use and nothing when you don't.
Cloudinary is an excellent developer platform, but connecting an AI agent means provisioning keys and writing an integration. SammaPix runs as a remote MCP server: an agent adds one URL, authorizes with Google (OAuth, no key to paste), and discovers 20+ image and PDF tools plus AI vision automatically. The pipeline tool chains operations in a single call, which matters because for an agent tokens are the real cost.
Because Cloudinary is a storage-and-delivery platform, your assets live on its servers by design — that is the point of a DAM. SammaPix stores nothing: files are processed in memory and discarded when the request ends. For an agent handling a user's private photos, contracts or scans, that difference is the deciding factor.
Cloudinary is a far larger platform. Storage, global CDN delivery, video transcoding, a huge transformation catalog, responsive delivery, and a mature DAM are things SammaPix does not do and is not trying to do. If your job is to host and serve media to millions of users, or to manage a large asset library with on-the-fly URL transformations, Cloudinary is the better tool and its per-transform economics are hard to beat. The two are complementary more than competitive.
Use Cloudinary when you need to store and deliver media at scale and can commit to a plan. Use SammaPix when you need on-demand image and PDF processing — especially for an AI agent — with pay-as-you-go pricing, no key, and nothing stored. For a deeper look at the agent side, see our image API comparison for agents and how to build image pipelines.