Is it worth paying for…

Is it worth paying for CloudConvert?

Last reviewed September 2026. Pricing and plans change; check CloudConvert's own site for current figures.

Short answer: Not for photos. CloudConvert is a general purpose conversion service that charges by the job, and for the everyday case, a folder of iPhone HEIC photos that need to become JPGs small enough to email or upload, a modern browser can do the whole thing itself. The free tool here converts, resizes and strips location data without sending a single byte anywhere.

Where the paywall sits

CloudConvert's free plan is a daily allowance of credits, ten a day at the time of writing, with a file size cap, and each conversion uses at least one credit and more for anything slow. Beyond that you buy credit packages or a monthly subscription priced by volume. Convertio, Zamzar and the rest of the category work the same way: a small free quota, a size limit, then a subscription.

The part the pricing pages do not dwell on is that every one of these services works by uploading your files to their servers. For a spreadsheet that is fine. For a few hundred personal photos, each carrying the GPS position of where it was taken, it is a strange trade for a job your own computer finishes in seconds.

What the free version here does

Decodes HEIC and HEIF in the browser, so iPhone photos open on Windows, Android and Linux where nothing else will read them.
Saves as JPG, PNG or WebP at a quality you choose, resizes a whole batch to fit within a chosen size, and can keep every file under a size limit for email or marketplace uploads.
Removes EXIF metadata on the way out: GPS position, device, timestamps, embedded thumbnails. Marks which originals carried location data.
Downloads one at a time or as a single ZIP. No account, no daily quota, no file size cap beyond your browser's memory.

Open Image Converter — free, no account

When paying might still make sense

You need formats a browser cannot produce: PDF to Word, video transcodes, vector or archive formats. That breadth is CloudConvert's actual product.
You want an API that converts files automatically inside your own software.
You are on a phone or a locked down work machine and a server doing the heavy lifting is the point.

How this one stays free

It runs entirely in your browser. There is no server to pay for, nothing is uploaded, and the code is open source. There is nothing to cancel because there was nothing to sign up for.

CloudConvert is a trademark of its owner. This page compares products and is not affiliated with or endorsed by CloudConvert.