Why we host every banner forever, free

If you've ever shipped a banner ad, you know the dance.

Generate the banner. Upload it to the ad network. A month later the campaign ends and the URL still works — until one day it doesn't, because the ad network deleted it, and now the banner you sent in last quarter's investor deck is a broken-image icon on slide 14.

We got tired of the dance. So when we built BannerKit AI, we made one decision differently than most generation tools: every banner you create stays at a permanent URL on our CDN, free, for as long as your account is active.

No re-uploads. No expiring links. Drop the URL into an ad network, an email, a Notion doc, a Slack message — wherever. It just keeps working.

Why most tools don't do this

Hosting isn't free. A static PNG and an animated GIF for 9 IAB sizes runs ~5–15 MB per banner, and a single user might generate hundreds. Multiply by every user and you're paying for terabytes of CDN egress every month.

Most banner generators dodge this in one of three ways:

• Download-only: you get a ZIP, then it's your problem. Now you need an S3 bucket and a CloudFront distribution. That's a Tuesday afternoon you didn't plan to spend.
• Time-limited URLs: hosted for 30 or 90 days, then garbage-collected. Fine for short campaigns. Awful for evergreen creative.
• Locked behind login: the banner only renders if you're authenticated to their dashboard. Useless for ad networks, which need a public URL.

Each of those choices makes the tool's economics easier and the user's life harder. We picked the trade-off going the other way.

How we make it work

Two things make permanent hosting affordable for us:

1. The marginal cost of CDN egress is small if you architect for it. We use DigitalOcean Spaces — S3-compatible storage with a built-in CDN at flat-rate pricing. Egress is included up to a generous monthly cap, and you're not paying per-request like raw S3 + CloudFront.

2. Banners are tiny compared to video. A 728×90 leaderboard PNG is ~50 KB. A 5-second animated GIF for the same size is ~200 KB. We could host hundreds of thousands of banners on a single Spaces bucket before the egress numbers start mattering.

So: storage is essentially free, bandwidth is bounded, and we get to make a promise that competitors can't easily match.

What "forever" means (in plain English)

The actual policy:

• As long as your account is active, every banner you've ever generated stays at the same URL.
• If you close your account, banners are queued for removal from the CDN. We give a 30-day grace period after closure before deleting.
• We don't garbage-collect by age. A banner you made on day one of signup will work on day 1,000.

We can't promise "forever" in the literal sense — no company can — but we can promise we'll never silently break URLs for users with active accounts, and that's the part that actually matters.

What this changes for you

A few practical things you can do now that you couldn't with most banner tools:

• Drop banner URLs directly into investor decks, pitch documents, or shared specs. They'll still resolve six months later when someone re-opens the deck.
• Use the same banner across multiple ad networks. Upload once to our CDN by virtue of generating it; reference the URL in Google Ads, Meta, AdRoll, your own site, anywhere.
• Reference banners in old emails. Newsletter footer ads from a year ago still render when someone scrolls back through their inbox.
• Hotlink in blog posts and landing pages. You're not paying bandwidth — we are.

It's a small thing. But small things compound.

Try it free

Five free credits when you sign up. One credit = one banner of any IAB size, hosted permanently. Generate, copy the URL, paste it anywhere.

Start generating →