Pricing
Mux pricing
The first 100,000 minutes delivered each month are free, with no card. After that Mux bills per minute stored and per minute watched, priced by resolution.
A 20-minute sales video watched 40 percent of the way through sends 8 minutes to each viewer. On Mux, 10,000 of those plays fit inside the free monthly allowance, and the bill is the few cents it costs to store the file. Your invoice starts once delivery passes that line, and from there it follows watch time and the resolution you serve.
There are no seats and no feature tiers. Encoding at basic quality is free, and Mux Data and Mux Player come with every plan.
Work out your VSL's monthly cost from your own length and watch rate, with Mux and five other hosts side by side.
Mux video pricing per minute, by resolution
Pay-as-you-go rates, basic and plus quality (Oct 2026). Delivery is free for the first 100,000 minutes each month at any resolution.
| Resolution | Storage, per min a month | Delivery, per min | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 720p | $0.0024 | $0.0008 | Base |
| 1080p | $0.003 | $0.001 | 1.25x |
| 2K (1440p) | $0.0048 | $0.0016 | 2x |
| 4K (2160p) | $0.0096 | $0.0032 | 4x |
Input is free at basic quality. Plus quality adds an encoding charge. Premium quality costs more to encode, and its storage and delivery run at one and a half times these rates. Delivery steps down automatically after 500,000 minutes a month, and contracts above $3,000 a month are quoted by sales.
The Mux free plan and the paid plans
Every plan bills usage at the rates above. The plans change what is included before that starts.
| 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 |
| Enterprise | Quote | Steeper volume discounts above $3,000 a month, SLAs, account security and 24/7 support |
Two add-ons sit outside the per-minute rates. Media-grade DRM is $100 a month plus $0.003 a play, and serving from your own playback domain is $100 a month. Signed URLs and domain restriction are free.
What a 20-minute VSL costs on Mux
Each row is one 20-minute video with 8 minutes delivered per play, the default in our cost calculator, so the 10,000-play row matches that page. The 1080p column assumes every minute goes out at 1080p, which is the ceiling: a player on a slow connection drops to a cheaper rendition. Totals are list rates before the monthly usage credit.
| Plays a month | Minutes delivered | Billed minutes | Month at 720p | Month at 1080p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | 80,000 | 0 | $0.05 | $0.06 |
| 50,000 | 400,000 | 300,000 | $240 | $300 |
| 100,000 | 800,000 | 700,000 | $560 | $700 |
| 200,000 | 1,600,000 | 1,500,000 | $1,200 | $1,500 |
Storage for one 20-minute file comes to five or six cents, so past the free line nearly the whole bill is delivery. On pay as you go the $20 usage credit comes off each total, which takes the smallest row to nothing. The real bill for the two largest rows is slightly lower than shown, because Mux charges less per minute once delivery passes 500,000 minutes.
I would size a Mux budget on delivered minutes at the resolution you actually serve, and cap the player at 720p for a talking-head sales video. A quarter more per minute buys a sharper face on camera, which rarely changes whether someone buys.
Mux delivers the file and reports on playback. Knowing which ad drove a purchase depends on the player and the tracking you add.
How Mux counts a minute
Delivery counts the seconds sent to the player, watched or not. Mux's pricing guide uses a player that buffers 20 seconds ahead as its example, and those seconds are charged. Its cost guide gives the example of a viewer who watches 5 minutes while the player buffers one more, and Mux bills 6 minutes. A VSL that most visitors leave early pays for that buffer on every play.
Storage is prorated by the share of the month a video stays up, and nothing is rounded to the minute. Basic-quality files carry a one-month minimum. A video nobody has played for 30 days drops to a cheaper tier, and after 90 days to a cheaper one again, so an old library of retired VSLs costs far less to keep than its list rate suggests.
The credit plans need care. Launch and Scale credit that goes unused in a month is lost, and a long-term PeerSpot reviewer called that the main cost trap on annual contracts, adding that the billing center once removed products without warning. Pay as you go has no such risk, which is why it is the plan to start on.
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
- Resolution multiplies the bill: 1080p is billed at 1.25 times the 720p rate, 2K at twice and 4K at four times, while Cloudflare Stream charges one delivery rate at any resolution, so a high-resolution library can cost more on Mux than on a flat-rate pipe
- 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
Does Mux have a free plan?
What does Mux charge per minute at 1080p or 4K?
Is there a Mux pricing calculator?
How is Mux Data billed?
Does prepaid Mux credit roll over?
Is Mux cheaper than Cloudflare Stream for a VSL?
Sources
From Mux
Other sources
5 discussions and reviews read for this page. Quotes are excerpts; open a link to read the original in context.
Related reading
- Mux pricing calculator for a VSL, with watch rate and five other hosts
- Our full Mux review
- Mux alternatives, ranked by the job
- Cloudflare Stream pricing, one delivery rate at any resolution
- Vimeo vs Mux, a plan-priced host against a per-minute API
- Our Bunny Stream review, another cheap usage-based delivery pipe
- The best VSL players and conversion video software
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