# Cheap video hosting: what a VSL costs to serve · VSLBench > Source: https://vslbench.com/best/cheap-video-hosting ## Cheap video hosting for marketers: what a VSL actually costs to serve Three budget hosts, three billing meters, priced against one sales letter on paid traffic. 3 hosts, picked by how they bill By [Marcus Vale](/authors/marcus-vale), Lead reviewer. Reviewed by the VSLBench editorial desk. Published 14 October 2026, using the prices each vendor listed that day. **Disclosure:**We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It never affects our rankings. You want the host that stays cheap at your play count, and the lowest number on a pricing page rarely tells you which one that is. For a typical sales letter, Gumlet Creator is the affordable flat plan if you want ad pixels without code, Bunny Stream gives the lowest per-gigabyte bill if you bring your own player, and Cloudflare Stream looks cheap until you count every minute it delivers. [Price your VSL in the cost calculator](/best/video-hosting-cost-calculator-what-your-vsl-costs-to-serve-each-month) ### Why cheap depends on how you are billed Budget hosts charge on one of three meters, and the meter decides your bill more than the headline rate does. * **Gigabytes delivered.** Bunny Stream charges for the data that leaves its network, so a lean encode costs less than a sharp one. * **Minutes delivered.** Cloudflare Stream and Mux count viewing time, whatever the resolution. * **Gigabytes included in a plan.** Gumlet sells a monthly allowance and bills past it. If you searched for pay as you go video hosting, the first two meters are what you meant: no plan, a bill that follows usage. Affordable video hosting with a fixed bill is the third. All three store and stream the file and stop there. None of them picks a split-test winner by sales or sends the order back to your ad account. If that is the job, the [VSL player picker](/best/vsl-player-picker-which-video-tool-fits-your-funnel) sends you to the right kind of tool. | Host | Billed on | Rates | Ad pixels | | --------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------- | | [Bunny Stream](#bunny-stream) | Gigabytes stored and delivered | Storage from $0.01 per GB, delivery from $0.005 per GB on the Volume tier | Added on your page or player | | [Gumlet](#gumlet) | Included bandwidth on a flat plan | Creator $6 a month billed annually, 3,000 GB a month, then $0.15 per GB | Google and Meta pixels on Creator | | [Cloudflare Stream](#cloudflare-stream) | Minutes stored and minutes delivered | $5 a month per 1,000 stored minutes, $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered | Added on your page or player | Rates as listed on each vendor's pricing page, 14 October 2026\. Listed by meter, in no ranked order. ### The VSL traffic this page prices Every pick below is judged against the same funnel our [cost calculator](/best/video-hosting-cost-calculator-what-your-vsl-costs-to-serve-each-month) starts from: a 20-minute sales letter, 10,000 plays a month, 40% watched on average, streamed at 1.5 Mbps. That works out to about 80,000 delivered minutes and about 900 GB of bandwidth. Watch rate moves both meters. Half the audience leaving at the four-minute mark halves the minutes billed and the gigabytes sent, so a weak hook is cheap to host and expensive everywhere else. The calculator also runs 50,000 and 200,000 plays, which is where the three hosts pull apart. ### Bunny Stream: pay as you go by the gigabyte Bunny Stream is video infrastructure billed on what you store and what you send. Its pricing page says the player, transcoding and security features cost nothing, and the bill is traffic plus storage, with a small monthly minimum. You can start on a 14-day trial with no card. Pick it if you already have a player you like, such as Presto Player on WordPress or one your developer built, and you want the lowest rate per gigabyte as traffic grows. It sends no Meta or Google pixel, so tracking lives on your page. The cost people miss is storage. Each resolution you enable is encoded and kept as its own file, so a library can hold several times the footage you uploaded. Turn off renditions your buyers never watch. The [Bunny Stream review](/reviews/bunny-stream) covers the setup, and [Vimeo vs Bunny Stream](/compare/vimeo-vs-bunny-stream) shows what you give up leaving a seat-based host. ### Gumlet: low cost video hosting for business on a flat plan Gumlet sells hosting the way a business budgets: one plan, a known monthly bill, and a bandwidth allowance large enough that the 900 GB model above sits well inside it. Creator removes the Gumlet branding and turns on Google and Meta pixel tracking, which makes it the only host here where a marketer gets retargeting data without touching code. Leaving Vimeo is less painful than it sounds. One r/videohosting user who moved over wrote that the migration tool kept their existing embed codes working, which spares you re-pasting every embed across your funnel pages. The plan stops being flat at its allowance. Past it, every extra gigabyte is billed, and DRM is a separate $99 a month add-on if your video needs it. Compare the two cheapest options side by side in [Bunny Stream vs Gumlet](/compare/bunny-stream-vs-gumlet), or read the [Gumlet review](/reviews/gumlet). ### Cloudflare Stream: pay as you go by the minute Cloudflare Stream bills two things: storage bought ahead in blocks of minutes, and minutes delivered, counted after the month ends. Encoding and bandwidth sit inside those rates, so there is no separate data bill, and nothing is charged to upload. It suits a team already on Cloudflare that builds pages through the API, so the video is billed in the same account as the rest of its Cloudflare services. In the calculator's 10,000-play model the bill comes to about $85 a month, one storage block plus 80,000 delivered minutes. That is where the cheap reputation stops holding for a long sales letter, because a 20-minute video watched for eight minutes is billed for all eight, at any resolution. Cloudflare's own pricing docs say preloading and buffering count as billable delivery, so a player that loads ahead costs you minutes nobody watched. Keep an eye on usage after a spike too: one Cloudflare user on Reddit described overage as the subscription rising on its own with minutes watched. The full rate table is on our [Cloudflare Stream pricing](/reviews/cloudflare-stream/pricing) page. If you like minute billing but want a free allowance, Mux includes 100,000 delivery minutes a month on its free and pay-as-you-go plans, which covers the 80,000 in this model. Like Cloudflare Stream, it is built for developers. ### When a cheap host is the wrong buy A cheap host stores bits. If your real question is which ad, hook or version of the letter brought the buyers, you need a VSL player, and those bill per play on a different budget line. The picker and our [ranked list of VSL players](/best) handle that choice. Seat-based hosts such as Vimeo can look cheaper at a few hundred plays, then hit a bandwidth ceiling once ads scale. If you are leaving for that reason, start with [Vimeo vs Bunny Stream](/compare/vimeo-vs-bunny-stream). If you need a host that costs nothing at all, that is a separate list of [free Vimeo alternatives](/alternatives/vimeo-alternatives-free). ### Price your own funnel before you move a video My take: a marketer with no developer should start on Gumlet Creator and only look elsewhere once the allowance is in sight. With a developer and a player already chosen, I'd put the video on Bunny Stream and turn off every rendition the audience does not use. I'd skip Cloudflare Stream for long sales letters unless the rest of your stack already runs on Cloudflare. Your numbers will not match the model's. Enter your plays, video length and watch rate, and pick the meter that comes out lowest. [Price your VSL in the cost calculator](/best/video-hosting-cost-calculator-what-your-vsl-costs-to-serve-each-month) ### Frequently asked questions Is billing by the gigabyte or by the minute cheaper for a sales video? It depends on bitrate and how long people watch. A minute of 1080p carries more data than a minute of 480p, so per-GB billing rewards a lean encode, while per-minute billing charges the same for both. Run your own plays and watch rate through the calculator to see which meter wins for your video. Do cheap video hosts include a Meta pixel? Of the three here, only Gumlet puts Google and Meta pixel tracking on its low annual plan. With Bunny Stream or Cloudflare Stream, the pixel goes on your landing page or in a player you add on top. What happens to the bill if an ad takes off? On the two usage-billed hosts the bill grows with the traffic, with no cap that stops playback. On Gumlet, traffic past the plan allowance is billed per extra gigabyte, so a spike costs money there too, only later. ### Changelog * **14 October 2026.** We published this guide, covering three hosts at the rates their pricing pages listed that day. ### Sources #### Other sources 8 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context. 1. \[\] [Bunny Stream pricing docs (vendor) ](https://bunny.net/docs/stream/pricing) Blog 2. \[\] [Bunny Stream pricing page (vendor) ](https://bunny.net/pricing/stream/) Blog 3. \[\] [Bunny Stream (vendor) ](https://bunny.net/stream/) Blog 4. \[\] [Gumlet pricing (vendor) ](https://www.gumlet.com/pricing/) Blog 5. \[\] [Cloudflare Stream pricing (vendor docs) ](https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/) Blog 6. \[\] [Mux pricing (vendor) ](https://www.mux.com/pricing) Blog 7. \[\] [Is anyone else getting killed by Vimeo's new pricing? (r/videohosting) ](https://www.reddit.com/r/videohosting/comments/1ryrzaj/is%5Fanyone%5Felse%5Fgetting%5Fkilled%5Fby%5Fvimeos%5Fnew/) Reddit 8. \[\] [Cloudflare not responding to billing issue (r/CloudFlare) ](https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/1qw2g7a/cloudflare%5Fnot%5Fresponding%5Fto%5Fbilling%5Fissue/) Reddit ### Related reading * [Bunny Stream vs Gumlet, head to head](/compare/bunny-stream-vs-gumlet) * [Our full Bunny Stream review](/reviews/bunny-stream) * [Our full Gumlet review](/reviews/gumlet) * [Our full Cloudflare Stream review](/reviews/cloudflare-stream) Written by Marcus Vale Lead reviewer Marcus Vale runs the VSLBench review desk. He has spent years buying paid traffic to video sales letters, and he now reads the player docs, pricing pages and long-term user reports to work out which tools actually move sales instead of just counting views. He writes the player and attribution reviews here, and he makes sure every ranking says which buyers should skip each tool. [marcus@vslbench.com](mailto:marcus@vslbench.com) Last checked 2026-10-14 --- VSLBench reviews and compares VSL players, video hosting, and conversion analytics for direct-response marketers. We judge every tool on one question: does it get more people past the pitch and let you prove which traffic buys? [Best of↗](/best) We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. It never affects our rankings. © 2026 VSLBench. Independent and reader-supported. VSL players and conversion video software reviews