Pricing
Cloudflare Stream pricing
Cloudflare Stream has no plan tiers. It bills on two dimensions, minutes stored and minutes delivered, with encoding and egress free. Here is what each costs, how the meters count, and the one caution that decides your bill.
Cloudflare Stream is priced the way a developer tool is priced, not the way a marketing product is. There are no plans, no seats and no feature tiers to decode. Stream charges on two things only: the minutes of video you store, and the minutes people watch. Encoding is free, and, unlike almost every other host on this site, so is egress: bandwidth is already inside the delivery figure, so there is no second bill for traffic.
That makes the model simple to read and cheap at low volume. The catch is not hidden in a tier, it is in a missing feature: there is no spending cap. This page lays out the two rates, how each meter counts, and how to keep the delivery bill from surprising you.
The two rates
Read on Cloudflare's own Stream pricing documentation on 27 September 2026. Ingress and encoding are always free, and delivery already includes bandwidth.
| What you pay for | Rate | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Encoding | Free | Uploading and transcoding into multiple bitrates cost nothing |
| Minutes stored | $5 / 1,000 min | Prepaid monthly, by video duration not file size; live recordings count too |
| Minutes delivered | $1 / 1,000 min | Postpaid, by minutes watched; egress and bandwidth included, no extra fee |
| Media Transformations | $0.50 / 1,000 | Clips, still frames and resizing; 5,000 unique operations free each month |
| Enterprise | Custom | Volume pricing for millions of minutes a month, quoted through sales |
You can start free with no card, and Pro and Business Cloudflare plans include a small monthly allowance of free storage and delivery minutes before the rates above apply.
The number that decides your bill: delivery, and the missing cap
Storage is easy to predict: it is the duration of the library you keep online, billed at $5 per 1,000 minutes a month whatever the file size. Delivery is the one that moves. It is counted by the minutes people actually watch, so the vendor's own example is the clearest way to hold it: two viewers each watching 30 minutes is 60 minutes delivered, about $0.06. Multiply your monthly viewers by the minutes they watch, divide by 1,000, and that is your delivery bill.
Two wrinkles are worth knowing. Client-side preloading and buffering count as billable delivery, while content served from the browser cache, like a short looping clip, does not. And there is no built-in spending cap. Delivery is postpaid and accrues as videos play, so a traffic spike or a video left open to unlimited end-user streams keeps billing with nothing to stop it. Cloudflare's own community forum carries requests for a hard limit that is not there. Watch the Stream analytics and billing pages, and if you serve untrusted or high-volume playback, put your own rate limiting in front of it.
What you are trading off
What works
- Usage-based and genuinely cheap: $5 per 1,000 minutes stored a month and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with encoding and egress free, so there is no separate bandwidth charge
- One API runs the whole pipeline: upload, encode, store, deliver, a built-in player or your own, plus RTMP and SRT live ingest with HLS and DASH output
- Runs on Cloudflare's global network, the infrastructure behind a large share of the web, so reach and reliability come as standard
- Predictable billing on two dimensions only, minutes stored and minutes delivered, with no card required to start and no opaque plan tiers
- Privacy-clean playback with no ads or trackers, plus signed URLs and token access for gated content
What to watch
- No direct-response conversion layer at all: no sales-scored A/B tests, no watch-depth pixels to Meta or Google, no revenue attribution and no marketing player, so a paid-traffic VSL has to build every one of those on top
- It is a developer product you drive through an API and your own code, so a marketer who wants a no-code dashboard to click through will find nothing here
- No built-in spending cap: a spike in delivery or unlimited end-user streams can run the bill up, and long-term Cloudflare customers report blunt overage and billing handling, so you have to watch usage yourself
- Reviewers report encoding is H.264 only and delivery caps at 1080p, with no 4K and no re-download of the original file, which matters if you need higher quality or the source back
- Support is slow and hard to reach on Free and Pro plans, with real help sitting behind an Enterprise contract
Pricing FAQ
How much does Cloudflare Stream cost?
How is a minute of storage and a minute of delivery counted?
Is there a free tier?
Can the bill run away?
How does Stream pricing compare with Bunny or a flat-plan host?
Sources
From Cloudflare Stream
Other sources
2 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context.