How to choose video hosting by minutes watched

Put your minutes stored, minutes watched per month, monthly uploads and growth rate into the calculator to price Cloudflare Stream, Mux, Bunny Stream, api.video and a DIY AWS pipeline side by side. These are the questions to settle before you trust the answer.

Why does the same video cost so differently across hosting platforms?

Cloudflare Stream and api.video bill per minute stored and per minute delivered, Mux adds a large free delivery allowance, and Bunny Stream and a DIY AWS pipeline bill by GB, so their per-minute cost depends on your bitrate. At 20,000 minutes stored and 500,000 watched a month, the cheapest and most expensive list prices in the calculator differ by several multiples, and the gap widens as viewing grows faster than the library.

What matters more than the list price?

Your viewing pattern. A course or membership site where each video is watched many times is a delivery-bill business, so low per-minute delivery wins. A UGC or archive product that stores a lot and plays little is a storage-bill business. Features priced outside this calculator, such as signed URLs, DRM, captions, analytics and live streaming, often decide the choice before cost does.

When should I move to a different platform?

When the 12-month spend under your growth rate differs enough to pay for the migration: re-encoding or copying the library, swapping the player and signed-URL logic, and re-checking embeds. Run the calculator with your own volumes and growth before deciding.