Cloudinary added a 3% annual fee increase to its enterprise agreement

The change

Cloudinary is an image and video management platform. Its public Terms of Use cover its standard plans and send enterprise plans to a separate contract, the Main Subscription Agreement (MSA). Enterprise prices are not published. At the time of publication, the pricing page shows a contact button for the enterprise plan instead of a price.

On October 8, 2026, the MSA page changed. The previous version ended with the line "Last updated on April 20, 2026." The new one is roughly two thirds longer and carries no date line. It rewrites clauses on fees, renewal, account activity, content, and indemnity, and it adds three attachments that were not on the page before. The rewrite touches most sections, so this article covers the changes with the most practical weight.

What changed

• Fees. Fees used to be "as stated in the applicable Order Form." They are now as stated in the Order Form "and are subject to a 3% annual increase."

• Renewal notice. Renewal for successive one-year periods was already in the agreement, with the notice left to the Order Form. The new text sets a default: written notice of non-renewal "30 days prior to the applicable subscription period," unless the Order Form says otherwise.

• Time to fix a breach. A party in material breach used to have "fourteen (14) days" to fix it before the other side could terminate. It now has "thirty (30) days."

• Account activity. You were already responsible for everything done through your account. The new text adds that "Cloudinary is entitled to rely on any instruction or action taken within Customer's account," and that you must "promptly notify Cloudinary" if you believe your credentials were wrongly accessed, disclosed, or used.

• Your content. You now state that you own or have "all necessary rights" in what you upload. Cloudinary can now remove or block content that may "jeopardize the security, integrity, or availability of the Services," on top of content that breaks its usage rules. It also now commits to "notify the Customer of any DMCA notice," meaning a copyright takedown request, and to cooperate in responding.

• Who pays if a third party sues. Your duty to defend Cloudinary used to cover claims alleging that your content, or your misuse of the service, violated someone's rights or the law. It now covers third-party claims made against Cloudinary "due to Customer's Content," or due to use of the service in violation of the MSA.

• Three attachments. A Service Level Agreement, AI Services Terms, and a Professional Services statement of work are now part of the public page.

• The date line. "Last updated on April 20, 2026" was removed and nothing replaced it.

The fee wording leaves the details open

The addition is seven words long: fees "are subject to a 3% annual increase." It does not say whether the increase applies at each renewal or in each year of a longer term. It does not say whether 3% is a fixed figure or a ceiling, and it does not say what amount the 3% is calculated on.

The two money clauses are also written differently. The renewal clause opens with "Except if otherwise agreed in the Order Form." The fee clause has no wording like that of its own, although it begins by saying fees are as stated in the Order Form. Enterprise prices are negotiated, so the first place to look is your own Order Form, and the public wording matters most where an Order Form says nothing about increases.

Price terms in standard agreements have been moving at other vendors too. Mural's renewals can now go up 5 percent a year instead of 3, Snyk dropped its 5 percent renewal cap, and DigitalOcean made its prices self-updating. Clauses like these are why vendor contract monitoring does not end on the day a contract is signed.

A default 30-day window to stop renewal

The old agreement said the term would renew for one-year periods unless either party gave written notice of non-renewal "as specified in the Order Form." The new one keeps the one-year renewal and fills in the number. If your Order Form sets a different notice period, that still applies, because the clause says so. If it sets none, the public agreement now answers the question with 30 days.

The refund rule did not change. Except where the agreement expressly provides for a refund, such as a termination for Cloudinary's material breach, ending it does not entitle a customer to a refund of fees paid. A renewal that goes through is another one-year term.

What the three attachments say

Service Level Agreement. The old page said support was covered by an SLA "attached to the Order Form." The SLA text is now public. It says "Cloudinary provides for Services Uptime of 99.9%," and it defines uptime as the availability of the management console and the API, "as measured by Cloudinary." Delivery to your visitors is outside that measure, because image delivery runs on a multi-CDN infrastructure "which operates independently of Cloudinary's Services availability."

• A credit is available only if uptime for a calendar month "falls below 99.6%."

• The credit is "a three-day extension of the applicable Subscription Term" for each such month, worth "up to 10% of the applicable monthly subscription fee."

• It has to be requested by email "within ten (10) days of the end of the subscription month," and it is the customer's "sole and exclusive remedy" for missed availability.

The page does not say whether these figures differ from the SLAs attached to earlier Order Forms.

AI Services Terms. The new terms add commitments on Cloudinary's side. It "shall reasonably cooperate" with a customer's AI due diligence, and it will not provide AI services in a manner "designed to, or knowingly likely to," generate content that infringes someone else's intellectual property. They also add weight on your side. You were already responsible for reviewing AI outputs before relying on them. That now extends to "any decisions or actions taken based on those outputs," and the terms say that "Customer shall not rely on Cloudinary to conduct such independent evaluation." Other vendors have written similar lines this year, as we covered when HubSpot made customers answer for what its AI agents do.

The terms also say the AI tools involved "may be developed by Cloudinary or sourced by Cloudinary from a third-party provider," and they point to the AI governance policy on Cloudinary's trust page. Who those providers are is a question for the sub-processor list, which is why it helps to monitor AI subprocessors alongside the contract.

Professional Services. Professional services used to be set out in "a mutually agreed Statement of Work." They are now performed under "Cloudinary's Statement of Work," which is on the page. It describes the work as "advisory and consultative in nature," and it gives the customer "up to six (6) months from execution of an Order Form" to use a professional services package.

What did not change

• Cloudinary still says it "will not use Customer's Content to train generative artificial intelligence models" without prior opt-in consent.

• Each side's total liability is still capped at the amount the customer paid Cloudinary in the twelve months before the event.

• Late payments still carry interest of 1.5% of the unpaid amount per month, or the legal maximum if that is lower.

• Cloudinary still says it will use reasonable efforts to give 48 hours' notice before the final removal of content.

• The clause on amendments is the same: "This MSA may not be amended or modified, except by the written consent of both parties hereto."

Why this matters

The page does not say how the new version reaches customers who signed under the old one. Two unchanged sentences are relevant. One is the amendment clause quoted above. The other says that "subscription renewals" are governed by the terms of the MSA. That makes a renewal and a new Order Form the moments to check which version you are agreeing to.

The date line matters for the same reason. The April version told a reader when it was last updated. At the time of publication, the page shows no date at all, so someone who opens it cannot tell from the text that it changed or when. That is the case for treating vendor legal changes as something to monitor continuously instead of something to read once.

The update is not one-sided. The longer time to fix a breach, the copyright notice commitment, and the published uptime figure give a customer things it did not have in writing on this page. The fee wording, the 30-day default, and the broader duty to defend Cloudinary go the other way.

Potential impact

If you are on a Cloudinary enterprise plan, the update raises five practical questions:

• What does your Order Form say about price increases, and is it silent on them?

• When does your current term end, and how many days of notice does your Order Form require to stop renewal?

• Which version of the MSA does your Order Form refer to?

• Does your uptime expectation cover delivery to your site visitors, or only the console and the API that the SLA measures?

• Who can act inside your Cloudinary account, and would you know quickly if a credential was misused?

How Venpo detected it

Venpo monitors Cloudinary's legal documents as part of continuous vendor risk monitoring. It recorded the new MSA when it replaced the April version and marked what was added and removed. Every quote in this article was checked against both versions and the live page. The redline is on the Cloudinary change page, and every monitored Cloudinary document is listed on the Cloudinary vendor profile.

Business outcome

Teams that track Cloudinary saw the full list of edits when the page changed, with the old wording next to the new. That is the difference between raising the 3% wording in a renewal conversation and finding it afterwards. Since the page no longer carries a date, a saved copy of the April version is also how you show what the text said before.

Key takeaway

Cloudinary's enterprise agreement now says fees are subject to a 3% annual increase, sets a default 30-day notice to stop a one-year renewal, puts its SLA, AI terms, and professional services terms on the same page, and no longer shows when it was last updated. Some of the edits favor customers and some do not, and the reliable way to see either kind is to monitor vendor terms of service and compare the versions.