Cloudinary keeps showing up in n8n workflows for one specific job - taking a binary file and returning a public URL. No transformations, no optimization. Just a hosted link.
Feels like a lot of setup and cost (starting at $89/month) for something that simple.
What are people actually using for this? Here’s what I’ve seen so far:
Google Drive / Dropbox - share links break when external APIs try to fetch the file directly
imgbb / imgur - no native node, HTTP request wiring every time
S3 / Cloudflare R2 - reliable but heavy setup for something simple
Upload to URL - I built this one, full disclosure. Verified n8n node, binary in, public CDN URL out
Genuinely curious what others are running in production - is there a cleaner solution I’m missing?
s3 with public acls is honestly the simplest. just set bucket to public, create an iam user with list+get perms, use the http request node to sign your requests — takes like 5 minutes to set up. cloudflare r2 is nicer if you’re already in that ecosystem tho
Cloudflare R2 works well for this. zero egress fees and the S3-compatible API means the AWS S3 node works with it out of the box. i think you can set up a custom domain too but havent tried that part myself. for anything under 10GB stored its basically free
Most people just use S3 or Cloudflare R2.
S3/R2 → standard, reliable, cheap
Cloudinary → overkill for simple hosting
Drive/Dropbox → unreliable for direct links
Simple tools exist, but for production, it’s usually S3/R2.
Exactly - for straightforward binary→URL cases, S3 or R2 is the sweet spot. No frills, reliable, and the cost is negligible for most use cases. @jitesh you’ve got solid options here, honestly can’t go wrong with either.
@barn4k yup, presigned URLs are definitely the right move here. avoids the whole public bucket exposure and keeps your S3 credentials secure. adds like 2 lines of code to the HTTP request signature, totally worth it