Estimated monthly infrastructure, at list price
$1,407,270 on Amazon IVS Real-Time (WebRTC)
- $7.0363per stream-hourfully loaded, all lines
- $0.1759per viewer-hour1.125 GB delivered
- $2.5523per highlight reelannotation + clip delivery
- 8.00Mviewer-hours per month9.00 PB egress
Follows where the viewer connects from, not where the channel lives.
Where the money goes
Every line below is metered separately and reconciles against a vendor invoice.
- Ingest and channel$9,721<1%
Scales with stream-hours. Accrues even when nobody is watching.
- Live delivery to viewers$371,34126%
Scales with viewer-hours and bitrate. The line that dominates at scale.
- AI annotation and reels$1,020,00072%
Scales with annotated stream-hours, not audience.
- VOD and clip storage$5,270<1%
Scales with recorded hours times retention.
- Highlight clip delivery$937.50<1%
Scales with reels times views per reel.
- Reels per month
- 400k
- Average stored
- 229.1 TB
- Clip egress
- 187.5 TB
- Effective $/GB delivered
- $0.0413
Same volume, every delivery path
Totals include AI, storage and clip delivery, which are identical across paths. Click a row to price it.
† You operate ingest, transcode and origin yourself. The per-stream-hour input below covers that compute, not the engineers.
Delivery cost per stream-hour vs audience size
Delivery only, first volume tier, no tier discounts. Both axes are logarithmic.
- IVS Real-Time
- IVS hybrid
- Bunny CDN
- CloudFront
- LiveKit
Drive it yourself
Nothing here is hidden. Change any input and every figure above updates, including the shareable link in your address bar.
Volume
Total broadcaster airtime across every streamer on the platform.
Hours actually delivered, not audience size times stream length. AWS's own estimator assumes a viewer watches about half a stream, so apply that haircut first.
Drives every per-gigabyte line. IVS Real-Time caps at 720p, so this is the honest common denominator across paths.
Audience mix
IVS bills output by the rendition the viewer actually received, and audio-only participants bill at a tenth of the standard rate. Shares are normalized, so they need not sum to 1.
AI highlights
Measured, not estimated: the metered cost of our tiered annotator across four real titles. Ranged from $3.59/hr on sparse mobile gameplay to $8.31/hr on dense arena shooter footage.
Share of stream-hours that get annotated at all. Gating annotation behind a minimum viewer count is the single biggest lever on this line.
Two per hour matches the measured $2.55 per 30-minute reel.
Sets clip size, which drives both clip storage and clip egress.
Over the reel's whole life, including shares off-platform. An assumption, not a measurement.
Recording and rates
In steady state you hold this many days of output at any instant, and S3 bills the average stored volume.
Only applies to the paths where you run your own stack. Covers compute, not headcount.
bunny.net Volume starts at $0.005/GB as a single global rate. Also prices highlight clip delivery on every path.
At these settings, annotation costs more than delivery
Every delivery architecture converges on one number: dollars per gigabyte. IVS bundles delivery into a per-viewer-hour rate that never drops below $0.0480 in North America, Europe, Israel, Türkiye, roughly 14.2x the cost of the same bytes on a commodity CDN. That gap is not a negotiation problem, it is the wrong product for the job past a certain volume.
Start on IVS because time-to-market dominates, and treat the migration to commodity delivery as a named milestone with a volume trigger rather than a someday.
Annotation scales with stream-hours; delivery scales with viewer-hours. At 40 concurrent viewers the model is the larger line item, which is why coverage and a minimum-viewer gate belong in the contract.
Pure WebRTC stops being the cheaper IVS option at about 79 concurrent viewers. Below that you pay per connected participant and nothing is fixed; above it the $0.92/hr of fixed channel cost amortizes away.
Where these prices come from
- Amazon IVS
- Full published rate ladder per billing region, not a premium on NA/EU: the regional gap widens with volume. Advanced HD channel input is $0.85/hr globally and accrues whenever a broadcaster is live, audience or not. Server-side composition adds $0.30/hr at HD.
- CDN and storage
- bunny.net Volume is one global rate with tier steps at 500 TB, 1 PB and 2 PB. CloudFront is priced per edge region across seven tiers. Storage is S3 Standard at $0.023/GB-month on every path, which understates the Cloudflare Stream column.
- AI annotation
- The only figure here that is not a vendor list price. It is our own metered cost across four real titles, and it moves with how eventful the footage is because the triage tier gates how many windows reach the expensive model.
- What is not modelled
- Private pricing. Everything here is list; AWS private pricing at this volume typically lands 15-30% below, and that discount is upside no number on this page reflects. Volume tiers also reset monthly and are per region, so aggregating studios into one account clears tier steps a single studio never would.
Talk to us about the real number
Infrastructure is passed through at cost, itemized and reconciled monthly against the underlying AWS and GCP invoices. Start with a 90-day proof of concept at zero cost and check the model against your own traffic.