Pricing
Mux pricing
Mux has no plan tiers to decode. It bills per minute of video, stored and delivered, with analytics and the player included free. Here is what each rate costs, how the pre-pay credit works, and the prepaid-credit caution that decides your bill.
Mux is priced the way a developer tool is priced, not the way a marketing product is. There are no plans to compare and no per-seat charge. Mux bills on the minutes of video you process: what you store, and what people watch. Input is free, and the analytics and player most hosts sell as upsells, Mux Data and Mux Player, are included at no extra cost. The one twist is resolution: storage and delivery both scale with it, so 4K costs several times what 720p does.
That makes the model clean to read and cheap to start, with a real free tier and no card. The catch is not hidden in a tier. It is in the pre-pay credit, which expires if you do not use it, and in a couple of add-ons that a per-minute rate does not show. This page lays out the rates, the credit plans and the cautions, so the price you plan for is the price you pay.
The plans and the per-minute rates
Read on Mux's own pricing page on 28 September 2026. Storage and delivery rates below are the 720p base; 1080p is 1.25x, 2K is 2x and 4K is 4x.
| Plan or rate | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 100K delivery minutes a month, 100K Mux Robots units, up to 10 videos stored, on-demand only, no card |
| Pay as you go | Usage | All features, on-demand and live, no storage limit, $20 monthly usage credit |
| Launch (pre-pay) | $20/mo | $100 in credit a month, then usage-based; includes 100K delivery minutes and Robots units |
| Scale (pre-pay) | $500/mo | $1,000 in credit a month, then usage-based; for growing apps |
| Storage | $0.0024/min | Per minute a month at 720p (input is free); newly uploaded video starts in cheaper cold storage |
| Delivery | $0.0008/min | Per minute watched at 720p, after the first 100K minutes free each month; Mux Data and Player included |
Two lines the per-minute rates do not show: media-grade DRM is $100 a month plus $0.003 a play, and a custom playback domain is $100 a month. Enterprise adds steeper volume discounts above $3,000 a month, SLAs and account security, quoted through sales.
The number that decides your bill: minutes and credit
Storage is the duration of the library you keep online, billed per minute a month, and Mux moves videos nobody is watching into cheaper cold storage automatically, which trims it further. Delivery is the one that moves with traffic: it is counted by the minutes people actually watch, at $0.0008 a minute at 720p after the first 100,000 free minutes. The multiplier to keep in mind is resolution, because both storage and delivery scale with it. The same watch time in 4K costs four times what it does at 720p, so the resolution you serve matters as much as the audience size.
The caution that is specific to Mux is the pre-pay credit. On the Launch and Scale plans you pay for a pool of credit each month, and if you do not use it, it expires rather than rolling over. A long-term user on PeerSpot put it plainly: annual contracts are prepaid, and if you do not use your monthly quota, you lose what you have paid for. The same reviewer flagged a billing center that once deleted products without warning while support was slow to respond. None of that touches playback, but all of it argues for the same approach: start on pay-as-you-go so you only pay for what you use, move to a pre-pay plan only once your usage is steady enough to consume the credit, and watch usage on the dashboard.
What you are trading off
What works
- Genuinely built for developers: one clean, well-documented API handles upload, encoding, storage, live streaming over RTMP and SRT, and delivery, with SDKs for most languages and a free Mux Player, so a team can ship a video feature in a couple of lines of code rather than months
- Playback analytics most hosts do not match, included free: Mux Data tracks views, playing time, viewer retention and quality-of-experience on every plan rather than charging for it as a separate product
- Usage-based and easy to model: input is free, you pay per minute stored and delivered, the first 100,000 delivery minutes each month are free, and a real free plan with no credit card lets you build before you pay anything
- Reliable at serious scale: Mux delivers billions of streams a month for the likes of Patreon, Substack, TED and Spotify's tooling and gets playback ready in an average of under two seconds, so it will not fall over under load
- AI workflows built into the same API: Mux Robots adds caption translation, summarization, chaptering, moderation and search over your library, priced per job rather than sold as a separate platform
What to watch
- It is video infrastructure, not a direct-response VSL player: there is no sound-first smart autoplay, no split test scored on the sale, no watch-depth pixel to Meta or Google and no revenue attribution, so a paid-traffic sales letter still cannot prove which traffic actually bought from inside Mux
- It is API-first with no no-code funnel builder: there is no marketing dashboard to build a landing page, capture a lead or wire up a pixel without writing code, so a non-developer marketer will be stuck, and Mux is a tool for engineering teams
- For plain on-demand hosting it is not the cheap option: reviewers put Mux at several times the cost of a usage-priced pipe like Cloudflare Stream for the same VOD, so it earns its price on analytics and live streaming, not on bargain delivery
- Billing is the loudest operational complaint: prepaid annual credit expires if you do not use your monthly quota, and one long-term user reported the billing center deleting products without warning while support was slow, so watch usage and keep any prepaid commitment modest
- Documentation can drift behind the product: even fans note the docs are not always current with what Mux now does, so check the API reference and changelog against the dashboard when a guide looks stale
Pricing FAQ
How much does Mux cost?
What are the pre-pay plans?
Is there a free tier?
What is the catch with Mux billing?
Is Mux cheaper than Cloudflare Stream?
Sources
From Mux
Other sources
3 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context.