Imagga

Developers who need to add image tagging, moderation or visual search to an app without training their own models are the natural audience for Imagga.

Imagga is an image recognition API that handles tagging, categorization, cropping, color extraction, visual search and content moderation through web requests.

The free plan gives you 100 API requests a month, which is enough to test the basic tagging, categorization, cropping and color calls with the online documentation, but not enough to run anything real.

Indie costs $79 a month for 70,000 requests and adds the Visual Search, Background Removal, Barcode Recognition and OCR text recognition APIs, plus email support.

Pro is $349 a month for 300,000 requests, adds the Face Recognition API and moves you to priority support.

Above 1,000,000 requests you move to the custom Enterprise plan.

It brings pay per use pricing, custom model training, a dedicated support engineer and on-premise deployment.

That last option matters if your images cannot leave your own servers.

Face recognition is locked to the Pro tier and up, so check that before you plan around it.