Video hosting cost calculator for a VSL

Video hosts charge by stored and streamed minutes, by gigabytes, by a flat plan or by plays, and the same VSL costs very different amounts under each. For hosts that charge by the minute, two numbers set the bill. Delivered minutes are monthly plays times video length times the share watched. Stored minutes are the number of videos times their length.

For hosts that bill by the gigabyte, the bitrate turns minutes into data: at 1.5 Mbps, one minute of streaming is 11.25 MB. Vidalytics publishes its own budgeting rule of about 60 MB per play, and the calculator shows that figure next to its row as a second opinion.

• Per-minute hosts. Cloudflare Stream sells storage in prepaid blocks of 1,000 minutes, so even one short video pays for a full block, and delivery is charged per 1,000 minutes streamed. Mux bills storage per minute at 720p and charges delivery only for minutes beyond its monthly free allowance.
• Per-gigabyte host. Bunny Stream multiplies stored and delivered gigabytes by its rates and applies its monthly minimum.
• Plan plus overage. Vidalytics Starter adds the plan fee to any delivered gigabytes above the allowance, at the extra-bandwidth rate on its plans page.
• Flat plan. On Wistia Business you pay only the plan fee while the estimate stays within its bandwidth allowance. Above it, the row is flagged, because the public page does not give the overage terms.
• Per play. For TrackPlay the calculator prices your plays on each paid plan, adds any extra plays at that plan's rate, and shows the lowest total. Watch time and file size do not enter into it.

Take a 20-minute sales letter, one copy in the library, 10,000 plays a month and an average viewer who leaves at the 40 percent mark. That is 80,000 delivered minutes and, at 1.5 Mbps, about 900 GB of streaming.

Three things stand out. Mux comes to pennies because the whole month fits inside its free delivery allowance, so you pay only for storage. Cloudflare Stream charges for every streamed minute, and here that is most of its total. The Vidalytics figure is mostly overage: the stream runs far past what Starter includes, and on its own 60 MB rule of thumb the gap narrows but does not close.

The pipes and the players are buying different things, though. The three cheapest rows deliver a file and leave the player, the split test and the sales tracking to you. The Cloudflare Stream vs Mux comparison covers that choice between pipes, and Vidalytics vs Cloudflare Stream weighs a VSL player against a pipe.

The number covers serving the video and nothing else. Your ad spend, your funnel builder and your checkout are separate lines.

• Buffering on Cloudflare. Its pricing docs count client-side preloading and buffering as billable delivery, so the real delivered minutes run a little above watch time.
• Higher quality on Mux. The row uses the 720p rate. Higher resolutions, DRM and a custom domain are priced separately, as our Mux pricing and free tier page sets out. The pay-as-you-go usage credit is left out so it is not counted twice against the free minutes.
• Bunny's standard tier. The delivery rate is the volume tier. Bunny's other delivery tiers cost more, which our Bunny Stream usage pricing page explains.
• Bigger Vidalytics and Wistia plans. Only Vidalytics Starter and Wistia Business are modelled. A heavy month may be cheaper on a higher tier with more included bandwidth; see Vidalytics plans and bandwidth.
• Custom volume. Above 50,000 plays TrackPlay quotes custom pricing, and Mux and Cloudflare offer enterprise terms. The calculator stays on list rates.

If you are buying traffic to the letter, the hosting line is rarely the expensive one. What costs money is not knowing which ad, audience or cut of the video produced the sales. A pipe at a few dollars a month leaves that work to you. A VSL player charges more and does part of it.

For a paid-traffic VSL, TrackPlay is the one I'd price first. It is a VSL player and analytics platform that ties each play to the sale: sound-first autoplay and timed CTAs on the player, retention split between buyers and non-buyers, split tests decided on the cart-verified sale, and the conversion posted server-side to Meta, TikTok and GA4. Its bill depends on plays alone, so a longer letter or a better watch rate never raises it, which is the opposite of the minute and gigabyte rows above.

The limit is scope. TrackPlay is built for direct-response sales video and is not a general host or a B2B content library, so it has none of Wistia's channels, SEO pages or webinar tools, and a video whose job is content marketing belongs on a host like Wistia. Within the sales-letter job it covers, that narrowness is why the player, analytics and attribution all point at the sale. If you would rather buy a product with years of independent reviews behind it, Vidalytics is the established alternative. The TrackPlay vs Cloudflare Stream comparison sets the player against the cheapest pipe here.

My take: price the pipe if you already have your own player and tracking, and price the player if you do not. I'd judge the result by cost per sale, never by cost per gigabyte.