Video Hosting Cost Calculator
Estimate monthly video hosting and delivery costs from views, average watch time, bitrate and storage — the streaming bandwidth is what drives the bill.
How it works
GB/view = bitrate Mbps × 60 × watch min ÷ 8 ÷ 1024 · Delivery = GB/view × views × $/GB · Total = delivery + storage
For video the dominant cost is almost always delivery bandwidth, not storage: every viewer pulls the full stream for as long as they watch. Data per view is bitrate times watch time, converted from megabits to gigabytes, and the monthly bill is that times your view count times the per-GB egress rate. Storage is a flat charge on your library size, usually small next to delivery. The two biggest levers are bitrate — adaptive streaming that drops resolution on slow connections saves real money — and watch time, which you generally would not want to cut.
Worked example
50,000 views at 4 minutes and 4 Mbps use 4 × 60 × 4 ÷ 8 ÷ 1024 ≈ 0.117 GB each, or about 5,860 GB a month. At $0.05/GB delivery costs roughly $293; a 100 GB library at $0.02/GB adds $2, for about $295 total.
Frequently asked questions
Why is bandwidth so much bigger than storage?
You store each video once but deliver it thousands of times. A 100 GB library costs a couple of dollars a month to keep, while streaming it to a busy audience can move terabytes — which is why delivery dominates almost every video hosting bill.
How does adaptive bitrate change the estimate?
Adaptive streaming (HLS/DASH) serves lower resolutions to slower or smaller-screen viewers, so the average bitrate across all views is often well below your top rendition. Enter a blended average rather than your 1080p peak to avoid overestimating.
Do specialist video hosts change the maths?
Managed hosts bundle encoding, storage and delivery into per-minute-streamed or per-view pricing, which can be simpler but not always cheaper at scale. Convert their price to an effective per-GB figure using this calculator’s bandwidth number to compare against raw cloud egress.
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This calculator is for educational purposes. Double-check important results before acting on them.