Bandwidth & CDN cost
Audience size times watch time times bitrate: that is the whole formula. The interesting part is what each variable does to the bill.
Resolution
Assumes a single delivery rendition at this resolution. Adaptive ladders average out lower in practice; treat this as the upper bound.
Delivery codec
The universal baseline. Plays on everything.
Monthly delivery
- Stream bitrate
- 5.5 Mbps
- Data per viewer-hour
- 2.48 GB
- Total watch time
- 10,000 hours
- Total egress
- 24.75 TB
What that costs to serve
| Provider | Rate | Est. / month |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare R2Zero egress fees; you pay storage and operations instead. | free egress | $0.00 |
| bunny.netStandard tier, EU & NA. Volume tier drops to $0.005/GB. | $0.010/GB | $248 |
| Cloudflare Stream$1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, bitrate-independent. Encoding included. | $1/1k min | $600 |
| AWS CloudFrontFirst 10 TB tier, US/EU, after the perpetual 1 TB/month free tier. | $0.085/GB | $2,017 |
| FastlyFirst tier, NA/EU, after the 100 GB/month free allowance. | $0.120/GB | $2,958 |
| Google Cloud StoragePremium Tier egress to NA/EU, first 1 TiB, after the 1 GiB free. | $0.120/GB | $2,970 |
Public list prices, first paid tier, NA/EU, verified 2026-07-31; Google Cloud Storage 2026-08-03. Volume tiers, request fees and regional differences are not modeled; details below the calculator.
How this is calculated
A stream at b Mbps transfers b × 3600 ÷ 8 ÷ 1000 GB
per hour, so a 5.5 Mbps 1080p stream costs about 2.5 GB per viewer-hour.
Multiply by viewers and average watch time for monthly egress. Bandwidth
is billed in decimal units (1 TB = 1000 GB), which is what we use.
The bitrates behind each resolution are typical H.264 delivery rates. Beware the numbers you see on upload guides: YouTube's recommended bitrates are upload targets with re-encode headroom and run roughly twice what services actually deliver. HEVC and AV1 rates derive from the efficiency factors described on the storage calculator. Real adaptive streaming serves a ladder of renditions and most sessions dip below the top rung, so treat the output as a defensible upper bound, not a quote.
Cost rows use each provider's public first-tier list price for North America and Europe, verified against the sources linked in the table notes. Cloudflare Stream bills per minute delivered rather than per GB, which is why its row ignores bitrate entirely. One honesty note: Cloudflare's famous "unmetered" CDN plans are not listed as free video delivery here, because their terms restrict serving video through the plain CDN; R2 and Stream are the products actually built for it.
Costs not modeled: volume-tier discounts, per-request fees (HLS segments generate hundreds of requests per viewer-hour), storage at origin, and regional multipliers (Asia-Pacific and South America egress runs 1.5–4× NA/EU prices on most networks). Above roughly 100 TB/month, nobody pays list price; you would negotiate.
Reading the results
Two levers dominate everything: codec choice moves the entire bill by 30–50%, and resolution is quadratic-ish in pixels but sublinear in bitrate, so 4K costs roughly 3× a 1080p stream, not 4×. If the estimate scares you, those are the two dials to turn, in that order.