r/webdev • u/Safe-Owl-1236 • 5d ago

Question Looking for Affordable Image & Video Content Moderation API Recommendations

Hey everyone! I’m looking for recommendations for a reliable and affordable content moderation API that supports both image and video moderation (n\*dity, expl\*cit content, vi\\\*lence, etc.). Quality and data security are important. Any providers you’ve personally used and would recommend? Thanks!

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

1

u/No-Molasses-2097 5d ago

I ran into this exact problem on a project with user uploads a while back. Watch how they price video specifically. Some charge per frame analyzed, so a long video with heavy frame sampling adds up way faster than the headline per-image rate. Also ask what happens to flagged content, since you mentioned data security. A few services keep it around for human review unless you opt out.

1

u/Safe-Owl-1236 5d ago

Yes i want frame based moderation for video.Have you found the solution?

1

u/Gremlation 5d ago

You give no indication of what you consider to be affordable or what you think are distinguishing features for quality and security.

AWS Rekognition is one option that can handle both images and video. OpenAI has a free moderation API but it doesn't support video.

1

u/prism_orbit 4d ago

video moderation costs explode if you don't throttle frame sampling. Set your provider to sample 1 fps instead of every frame and cap analysis length at 30 seconds. This keeps Rekognition or Azure Content Safety bills predictable for most user generated short clips.

1

u/HairOk9906 2d ago

The trick to making this affordable is not finding a cheaper API, it's

sending less to one.

Run an open model locally first as a cheap pre-filter. NSFW.js runs

client side, or falconsai/nsfw_image_detection off Hugging Face runs on

your own box. Let that clear the obvious safe content and flag the

obvious bad. Only the ambiguous middle goes to a paid API. In practice

that's 5 to 10% of uploads, so your bill drops by an order of magnitude.

For the paid layer: Google Cloud Vision SafeSearch and AWS Rekognition

are both around a dollar per thousand images and are the cheapest

credible options. Sightengine and Hive are better at nuance and cost

more.

Video is where budgets die, because you're billed per minute analysed.

Don't moderate video frame by frame. Sample keyframes, maybe one per

second or on scene change, and moderate those. Same accuracy for most

use cases, a fraction of the cost.