βGB delivered
βper stream hour
βper year
Streaming: the egress iceberg
Live streaming stacks three meters: ingest (usually free), transcoding (per input minute β a 6-rendition ladder on a 3-hour stream runs $5β$15), and delivery, which dwarfs both. Delivery = viewers Γ bitrate Γ duration: 1,000 viewers watching a 4 Mbps stream for an hour move ~1.8TB β $15β$150 depending on CDN rates. That delivery line explains the entire industry structure: it's why Twitch can't pay creators more, and why every serious streaming business negotiates CDN commit contracts. Multi-CDN routing and per-title bitrate optimization are the levers that actually move the bill.
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How this calculator works
The Live Streaming Cost Calculator estimates your monthly delivery bandwidth bill β the cost of pushing video from a CDN or streaming provider to your audience. It multiplies four inputs to project that spend: peak concurrent viewers, bitrate in Mbps, stream hours per month, and your price per GB of egress. In practice, viewers times bitrate sets how much data flows each second, hours scale that over the month, and the per-GB rate converts the total transferred gigabytes into dollars. Because these factors multiply, a change in any one of them moves the bill proportionally, and higher-quality streams to larger audiences grow the number fastest.
The key trade-off to watch is bitrate versus reach. Doubling video quality doubles bandwidth and cost for every concurrent viewer, so a small resolution bump across a large audience can be far more expensive than it first appears. Use the calculator to test scenarios β adjusting peak concurrency and bitrate β before committing to an encoding ladder or a delivery contract. It also helps you compare per-GB egress rates between providers, since that rate applies to your entire monthly volume and often dominates the total once your audience scales.
Frequently asked questions
How is live streaming cost calculated?
Delivery bandwidth is the dominant cost: concurrent viewers times bitrate times duration. One viewer at 3 Mbps for an hour is about 1.35 GB. Multiply by audience and hours, then by your per-GB CDN egress rate.
How do I lower streaming bandwidth cost?
Offer adaptive bitrate so phones do not pull the 4K stream, negotiate committed CDN pricing at volume, and keep streams to their scheduled length. Encoding is minor next to delivery β egress is the meter.