These updates aim to improve your experience and streamline plan setup and credit consumption optimization. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new.

Plan Setup: Simplified Subscription Management

We’ve revamped the subscription page with new features and better functionality. The Plan Setup page now allows you to choose between Free, Business, or Professional plans, customize your monthly credit supply using a slider, and access our new API Credit Consumption Calculator—a handy tool to help you make informed decisions.

The entire checkout process has been streamlined as well, allowing you to adjust your payment method directly before completing your purchase.

Manage Your Payment Methods and Currencies

You can change the default currency for plan setup and payments in the Settings. To update your payment method, simply access the Stripe Portal from your Plan Overview under “More Actions.” If you prefer a different payment method or have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to us!

Credit Calculator: Estimate & Optimise Your Credit Consumption

One of the most exciting additions to the app is the new Credit Calculator, now available directly within the platform. While this tool was previously featured on our Pricing page, it’s now integrated into the app as well, allowing you to not only estimate your credit needs but also preset your subscription plan directly from the calculator.

Once you’ve adjusted your credits based on projected usage, you can proceed straight to checkout, making the entire process of optimizing and purchasing credits smoother and more efficient.

Plan Overview: A Complete View of Your Plans and Credits

The page Plan Overview gives you a comprehensive view of your active subscription, any past plans, and your pre-paid credit packs. Previously, credit information was limited to your dashboard, but now you have detailed insight into your credit usage and plan history.

In the Plan Overview, you can view all your current active subscription plans. If you upgrade or downgrade, multiple plans may temporarily appear, as credits from your previous plan remain available until the end of the billing period.

Reports: Detailed Insights into Credit Usage

Our new Reports page enables you to gain deeper insights into your API credit usage. It provides two types of reports: credit consumption by AI solution (e.g., Card Grading) and by individual operation within a solution (e.g., “grade one card” within the Card Grading solution).

Credit Packs: Flexibility to Buy Extra Credits Anytime

API Credit packs act as a safety net for unexpected system loads. Now available on their dedicated page, you can purchase additional API credit packs as needed. You can also compare pricing against higher subscription plans and choose the most cost-effective option. Both your active and used credit packs will be displayed on the Plan Overview page.

Invoices: All Your Purchases in One Place

This updated page neatly lists all your invoices, including both subscription payments and one-time credit pack purchases, ensuring that all your financial information is in one place.

Greater Control & Flexibility For the Users

These updates are designed to provide you with greater control, transparency, and flexibility as you build and deploy visual AI solutions. All of these features are now accessible in your sidebar. Check them out, and feel free to reach out with any questions!

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All Important Things at Hand

Ximilar provides a platform for visual AI, where anyone can create, train and deploy custom-made visual AI solutions based on the techniques of machine learning and computer vision. The platform is accessible via API and a web-based App, where users from all around the world work with both ready-to-use and custom solutions. They implement them into their own apps, quality control or monitoring systems in factories, healthcare tools and so on.

We created the new interface to adapt to the ever-increasing number of services we provide. It now makes better use of both the dashboard and sidebar, showcases useful articles and guides, and provides more support. So, let’s take a look at the major new features!

Service Categories & News

We grouped our services based on how they work with data and the degree of possible customization. After you log into the application, you will see the cards of four service groups with short descriptions on the dashboard. Below them, you can see the newest articles from our Blog, where we publish a lot of useful tips on how to create and implement custom visual AI solutions.

The service groups are following:

1. Ready-to-use Image Recognition includes all the services, that you can use straight away without the need for additional training, custom tags and labels. In principle, these services analyze your data (i.e., your image collection) and provide you with information based on image recognition, object detection, analysis of colors & styles etc. Here you will find Fashion Tagging, Home Decor Tagging, Photo Tagging and Dominant Colors.
2. Custom Image Recognition allows you to train custom Categorization & Tagging and Object Detection models. Flows, that enable you to combine the models, are also under this category. To prepare the training data for object detection seamlessly and fast, you can use our own tool Annotate.
3. Visual Search encompasses all services able to identify, analyze and compare visually similar content. Image Similarity can find, compare and recommend visually similar images or products. You can also use Image Matching to identify duplicates or near-duplicates in your collection, or create a fully custom visual search. Fashion Search is a complex service based on visual search and fashion tagging for apparel image collections.
4. Image Tools are online tools based on computer vision and machine learning that will when provided with an image, modify it. You can then either use the result or implement these image tools in your Flows. Here you will find Remove Background and Image Upscaler.

Do you want to learn more about AI and machine learning? Check the list of The Best Resources on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Discover Services

Within the service groups, you can now browse all our services, including the ones that are not in your pricing scheme. Every service dashboard features a service overview and links to documentation, useful guides, case studies & video tutorials.

Do you want to know what you pay for when using our App? Check our article on API credit packs or the documentation.

Guides & Help at Hand

The sidebar underwent some major changes. It now displays all service groups and services. At the bottom, you will find the Guides & Help section with all necessary links to the beginner App Overview tutorial, Guides, Documentation & Contacts in case you need help.

How to make the most of a computer vision solution? Our guides are packed with useful tips & tricks, as well as first-hand experience of our machine learning specialists.

Customize the Sidebar With Favorites

Since each use case is highly specific, our users usually use a small group of services or only one service at a time. That is why you can now pin your most-used services as Favorites.

When you first log into the new front end, all of your previously used services will be marked as favourites. You can then choose which of them will stay on top.

What’s next?

This front-end update is just a first step out of many we’ve been working on. We focus on adding some major features to the platform, such as explainability, as well as custom image regression models. The Ximilar platform provides one of the most advanced Visual AI tools with API on the market, and you can test them for free. Nevertheless, the key to the improvement of our services and App are your opinions and user experience. Let us know what you think!

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How API Credits Work

Imagine you upload a training image, create a recognition label, or send an image for recognition in our App. Every time you perform an operation like this, you send a request to our server using API. This request is called an API call.

To keep track of API calls and their requirements, each type of call corresponds to a certain number of API credits. Generally, all calls sending image data to our servers cost some API credits. The full list of operations with their API credit values is available in our documentation.

Your Monthly API Credits

Every user of the Ximilar App is provided with a monthly supply of API credits, depending on their pricing plan. This supply is renewed every month on the day they made the purchase of their plan. For example, if you purchase a Business plan on April 15th, your monthly supply will be restored on the 15th day of every consequent month.

The users with the Free pricing plan are provided with a monthly supply of API credits as well. Whether you use a paid or free plan, the unused API credits from your monthly supply are not transferred to the following month and expire.

Introducing API Credit Packs

Ximilar App users can now buy an unlimited number of API credits aside from their monthly supply, in the form of API credit packs. This option is available for all pricing plans, including the Free plan.

There are two major benefits of the API credit packs. First, credits from the packs are used only when your monthly supply of credits runs out. In this example, the user with the Business plan has already used all API credits from his monthly supply and the system automatically switched to using the API credit pack. On April 15th, his monthly credit balance will be renewed, and the system will switch back to the monthly supply.

Second, API credit packs have no expiration. Therefore, their balance passes to the next month. You can buy as many credit packs as you need. The credits will add up in the lower API credit bar.

Typical Uses for API Credit Packs

The credit packs cover both expected and unexpected system loads. There are more ways and situations in which they can help or serve as safety nets.

Get Your System Ready

Our users generally pick their pricing plan based on regular traffic on their websites. However, the initial service setup is more demanding, and it costs a lot of extra credits. In this case, you wouldn’t want to upgrade your pricing plan for the short period of higher workloads and then downgrade back to the plan suiting your long-term needs.

One-Time System Loads

As you could see in the example with a Business plan user, the number of API credits in the credit pack bar was twice as high as his monthly credit supply. It is common for our users to use an above-average number of credits from time to time – typically when they are expecting higher system loads than usual. For example, uploading more products and images, or adding a brand new collection, would mean withdrawing your monthly credit supply too soon. In such cases, API credit packs provide a cost-effective solution.

Safety Net in a Case of Higher Traffic

The credit packs also cover the situations of unpredicted system loads caused by third parties. For example, when your website is visited and the system is used by an unexpected number of customers in a short period.

This way, the credit packs provide a sort of safety net to make sure no service outages will occur on your side due to the sudden exhaustion of credits.

What if I Upgrade or Downgrade My Plan?

You can always upgrade or downgrade your pricing plan. When this happens, the credits from your previous plan’s monthly supply will add up to the monthly supply of your new plan. They will remain in the bar till the end of your old monthly subscription and will be used first. In addition, you can purchase as many credit packs as you need, and the credits from the packs will be used after both of your monthly supplies are exhausted.

Do you have any questions? We’re more than happy to talk.

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To say it simply, artificial intelligence vision got to a point, where it is easy not only to recognize objects in a photo, but also detect features of each thing. That creates a new universe of opportunities for real-world application in e-commerce & traditional industries alike. And Ximilar is a computer vision platform that digs deep into some pretty narrow use cases. So while the big solutions might be great in many ways, Ximilar might very well be the agile alternative.

Ximilar offers you a great cloud AI platform for training your custom image recognition models and advanced visual search services.

Ximilar is Not a Big Corporation

And that is a good thing. Because we keep things simple, streamlined, and we have time to listen to each customer’s needs. We also have the ability to implement new custom features in a timely manner. And we do it as fast as we can, widely benefiting both customers and us, freeing our manpower from manual work.

We at Ximilar create, and continuously improve, advanced visual search, image recognition services & image tools for businesses around the World. That happens in few areas:

• Ximilar recognition app – AI cloud platform for training custom image recognition models
• Ximilar annotate – image annotation tool for creating great datasets
• Visual Search – fashion, stock photos, real estate, home decor, cards, … search engines
• Ready-to-use services – fashion tagging, home-decor and collectibles recognition API
• Image tools – upscale your images and remove the background with API
• and in many cases the most challenging custom AI solutions

We are also not an enterprise that requires millions of users of its services to just stay afloat. See for example how many services were killed by Google. No. Rather than growth in quantity, our center of the universe is how precise we get, and how reliable & sustainable results we deliver. And how we can grow strong together with our customers, or we should rather say our partners.

Here is why Ximilar could be a solid alternative for you if you need to iterate quickly and reach reliable results in narrow fields. Or if you simply need someone who takes your idea further and finds an AI solution to deliver value to your business.

1 – We are focused AI Team

We craft our features to perfection, and we test & use them ourselves. We continuously improve our application for everybody to benefit from new findings in AI vision industry. And we also do things that customers ask for, we don’t just sell access to a platform.

2 – We are an independent company

These days, many companies are created to be acquired. They are created to grow no matter the sustainability of such growth. We are different. Our customers like that we would not disappear tomorrow — getting acquired by a giant and then dissolved into some unreachable feature of some huge app suite is not our target.

3 – We innovate faster

We don’t have a large team and therefore decisions are quick. We are a team of remote professionals working in a field that we truly love and would like to explore to the edge of possibilities. It’s a lot of fun to work on our customers’ challenging tasks. And we are happy to customize any feature. The customer’s budget is the only limit.

4 – Save expenses on AI

Our AI solutions are significantly cheaper than the solutions of big AI players. We are able to save you a lot of money on training and deploying your custom models. For example, training and deploying a model on Google Vertex AI can cost you thousands of dollars, without even calling the API. For Vertex AI AutoML models you are paying for training, deploying and calling a model. Similar pricing for features can be applied to Amazon Rekognition and Azure Custom Vision services. With Amazon Rekognition you are also paying for each hour your model is deployed! On the other hand, AI models built via our platform are trained and deployed for free! You are paying just for calling the API. No more hidden costs.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Narrow Field vs. Generic AI

This one is personal. You would see a lot of simple AI applications, like detecting a cat and a dog in a given — well lit & well shot — picture. But in reality, the bread and butter of applied visual AI is narrow field recognition and analysis of large volumes of images, where the customer needs pretty high accuracy on a specific subject. For example, detect a type of screw on a blurry cellphone photo, shot in bad lighting conditions.

Unlike the giants who mostly sell you ready-made solutions that you can hardly bend to meet your needs, Ximilar is in the other end of the spectrum, brainstorming with customers about how to solve the use case that they have. Being their partner in the path to success.

Examples of such narrow use cases are

• Detecting coffee grounds in a cup – for a customer who receives millions of images to their mobile app used to foretell the future for its users. You wouldn’t believe how many users in coffee-drinking countries use such an app.

• Recognition of trading cards from photo – A cool use-case that was a dream of every geek. Not anymore. Simply snap a photo of a sports card or a game like Pokémon, and the app will identify a card and return a price listed on eBay. You can build your own portfolio tracker and much more with Ximilar.
• Give me a quality rating of a photo – this one was brought up by a hotel reservation site and real estate company. They need to detect the best photos of a property, while the photos are often delivered by a re-seller, or a hotel owner and might not be well shot. And we all know that good photos sell better. Ximilar can help even there with upscaling images and improving their quality.

Lower Price for Higher Accuracy

While the examples above might be fun to read, let’s get to real facts, hardcore numbers and actual user feedback. Because that is a requirement for any business to base its thoughts on. Here are some real-life examples of our customer experiences.

• Ximilar Recognition is cheaper and has comparable accuracy as Microsoft Custom Vision, Amazon Rekognition, Google Vertex AI and IBM Watson. At least several of our customers, and users of the Ximilar App, achieve even better accuracy than with the big cloud solutions. Ximilar allows users to control various parameters of training from a simple GUI.

• UX of Ximilar App is extremely easy to use, also reported by our customers, saying: “Ximilar has a shallow learning curve in comparison to others”. Connection to the API and integration to your systems and apps is easy.
• Ximilar has advanced features for tuning of your recognition tasks which no other services provide — flips, rotations, etc.

• Ximilar Product Similarity and Custom Similarity are unique services for finding visually similar alternatives in fashion, home decor and other image collections
• Ximilar is much more flexible as we are willing to improve our service for your needs – e.g. add more tags to our models — according to your requirements and keep it attached to your data exclusively
• We are cheaper — Google AutoML Vision/Vertex AI is significantly much more expensive than our solution
• Ximilar Fashion Tagging is at the top of abilities in fashion object recognition
• Elaborate management of tags & categories for more projects of higher complexity — we are the only system we know of, that enables users to share training data between categorisation and tagging tasks, chaining recognition models into one API…
• Ximilar, unlike the big competition, is able to install the system on-premise, giving you better control over the system, do a lot of flexible customizations

This is just a brief summary of what we see as benefits for you if you use Ximilar as your partner for pioneering the AI world. We see it now as really just the beginning of all the possibilities that might come in the future of automation and machine learning abilities. We have been around for many years now and Ximilar would surely be around for the years to come. Backing you on the way. Enjoying the exploration.

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