Pricing
Cloudflare Stream pricing
Storage is $5 per 1,000 minutes, sold in prepaid blocks. Delivery is $1 per 1,000 minutes served. Encoding and egress are included.
A 20-minute sales video fills only a slice of a storage block, and the charge is still the whole block. Delivery is the line that moves. It follows the minutes people watch, plus whatever the player buffers before they do.
You buy storage ahead of time and pay for delivery after the video has been served. See what your VSL costs at your own length and watch rate.
The two rates
Rates (13 Oct 2026). Ingress and encoding are included, and delivery already includes bandwidth.
| What you pay for | Rate | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Encoding | Included | Uploading and transcoding into several bitrates cost nothing extra |
| Minutes stored | $5 / 1,000 min | Prepaid each month, by how long the video is. Live recordings count |
| Minutes delivered | $1 / 1,000 min | Billed after playback, by minutes served. Bandwidth is included in this rate |
| Pro and Business | Included | 100 minutes stored and 10,000 minutes delivered, then the paid rates |
| Media Transformations | $0.50 / 1,000 | Clips, still frames and resizing. 5,000 unique operations included each month |
| Enterprise | Custom | Volume pricing for millions of minutes a month, quoted through sales |
Web playback and live HLS use these rates now. Cloudflare's pricing page says billing for WebRTC delivery starts on 15 October 2026.
What a 20-minute VSL costs
Each row is one 20-minute video with 8 minutes delivered per play, the same default the cost calculator uses, so the 10,000-play row matches that page. The file sits in a single storage purchase with room left over.
| Plays a month | Minutes delivered | Delivery | Storage | Month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 80,000 | $80 | $5 | $85 |
| 50,000 | 400,000 | $400 | $5 | $405 |
| 200,000 | 1,600,000 | $1,600 | $5 | $1,605 |
On Pro or Business, this one file sits inside the stored-minute allowance, and delivery drops by the included 10,000 minutes. Buffering can push the delivered minutes above watch time, because Cloudflare counts preloading as delivery.
Change the length or the watch rate in the video hosting cost calculator.
I would judge a sales video by the delivery charge. The storage purchase barely moves for one 20-minute file, and the invoice follows how long people watch. Stream still only moves the file. The sale has to be scored in the player you put on top of it.
How a minute gets counted
Storage is duration, rounded up to the second, whether the file is small or up against the 30 GB upload limit. Deleted videos and failed encodes release the reservation. A live broadcast with nobody watching still stores the recording, and it delivers nothing until someone plays it.
Cloudflare's own example is the simplest check. Two people each watch 30 minutes, which is 60 minutes served, about $0.06. Web playback rounds to the segment length, four seconds on an uploaded file. A short clip served from the browser cache is left off the bill.
When the storage you bought is full, new uploads and new live inputs wait until you buy another block or delete a video. Enterprise accounts may keep uploading past the contracted quota.
What you are trading off
What works
- One API covers upload, encoding, storage, a built-in player or your own, and live ingest over RTMP and SRT with HLS and DASH out.
- Encoding and egress are included, so the invoice has no separate bandwidth line.
- Signed URLs and token access limit who can play a file, and the player is ad-free.
- Live recordings sit on the same storage meter as on-demand files.
What to watch
- Nothing on the player records which visitor bought or which cut produced the order.
- Preload and client-side buffering count as delivered minutes. An autoplay page can run up a charge for minutes the viewer never watched.
- Delivery keeps running past a reserved minute block. One r/CloudFlare report described a thousand reserved minutes appearing as 50,000 on the invoice.
- Encoding is described as H.264 only, delivery caps at 1080p, and the original upload is not returned.
- Help on the lower Cloudflare plans is hard to get. Useful replies to a billing problem require an Enterprise contract.
Pricing FAQ
How much does Cloudflare Stream cost?
Is Cloudflare Stream free?
How does Cloudflare Stream price minutes stored and minutes delivered?
What does a 20-minute VSL cost at 10,000, 50,000 and 200,000 plays?
Can a Cloudflare Stream bill keep growing during a spike?
Sources
From Cloudflare Stream
Other sources
3 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context.
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