Live video costs in 2026: Mux, Cloudflare, IVS, Hubfly space

TL;DR

• What you get: the monthly bill for one realistic live show (four 2-hour 1080p broadcasts a month) on four platforms, at 50, 500 and 2,000 viewers, with every formula shown.
• Who it's for: developers adding live video to a course site, church, community, webinar series or SaaS product.
• Time needed: 10 minutes to read, 5 more to plug in your own numbers.
• Short answer: up to about 215 full-show viewers, Mux is free (100,000 free minutes plus a $20 credit). Between about 215 and 255 the two cost about the same, so pick on features. From about 255 to 500 concurrent viewers, Hubfly space Streams costs a fraction of the others. Above ~500 concurrent HD viewers, or if you need global edge delivery, captions or DRM, pick Mux, Cloudflare Stream or IVS.

You want to stream a weekly show to your own website. Every video API says "simple pricing". Then you open the pricing pages and find four different units: minutes encoded, minutes delivered, hours delivered by resolution and region, and gigabytes sent. You can't compare them in your head, and the wrong pick can cost you ten times more than it should.

This guide puts one show through all four price lists so you can see the real bill. It also shows where each platform beats the others, because none of them wins everywhere.

Try Hubfly space Streams free: the first 25 Mbps of speed, 20 processing Mbps-hours and 50 GB of bandwidth are free every month.

The show to price

Pick one concrete workload, or comparisons turn into vibes:

• Four live shows a month, 2 hours each: 8 live hours, 480 minutes.
• 1080p source with an adaptive ladder (1080p, 720p, 480p), so viewers on slow connections still get smooth playback.
• Viewers watch the whole show. That's the worst case for your bill; real audiences drop off, so your bill will be lower.
• Quality mix: half of viewers on 1080p, 30% on 720p, 20% on 480p. Per-minute vendors that price by resolution (Mux, IVS) and per-GB vendors (Hubfly space) both depend on this mix, so it's stated up front.
• Keep the recordings for a month.
• Viewers in North America or Europe (it matters for IVS, which prices by viewer region).

All prices are list prices from each vendor's official page on 4 November 2026, pay-as-you-go, before tax and before any negotiated discount.

How each platform charges for live video

Mux

Mux charges per minute. Live streams need the plus quality level (basic is on-demand only), and live is capped at 1080p.

• Input (encoding): $0.03125 per minute at 1080p, $0.025 at 720p, for the first 5,000 minutes.
• Delivery: first 100,000 minutes free every month, then $0.001 per minute at 1080p and $0.0008 at 720p and below.
• Storage: Mux turns every live stream into an on-demand recording automatically. $0.003 per minute per month at 1080p.
• Credit: the pay-as-you-go plan includes a $20 monthly usage credit.
• Extras: live captions (6,000 minutes free, then $0.024/min), simulcasting at $0.02 per minute per target, DRM at $100/month plus $0.003 per license.

Cloudflare Stream

Cloudflare Stream bills two things only.

• Delivery: $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, any resolution. Ingest and encoding are free.
• Storage: prepaid, $5 per month for each 1,000 minutes stored. Live recordings use it, and you can't start a new live stream if you run out.
• Simulcast outputs count as delivered minutes. WebRTC (WHEP) playback is billed as delivery too.

Amazon IVS

Amazon IVS charges per hour, by channel type and by the resolution and region your viewers watch from.

• Input: $2.00 per hour for a Standard channel (1080p with an adaptive ladder), $0.50 with Multitrack Video, $0.85 for Advanced HD (720p).
• Output (North America and Europe, first 10,000 hours): $0.144 per viewer-hour at Full HD, $0.072 at HD, $0.036 at SD. Other regions cost more, up to $0.25 in South Korea.
• New AWS accounts get a 12-month IVS free tier (basic-channel input, SD output) and up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits (6-month free plan; use within 12 months), which would cover this show at 50 viewers for about three months.

Hubfly space Streams

Hubfly space Streams prices the network, not the minutes. Three meters:

• Speed: the most the server may send at once. 41 µUSD per Mbps per hour (about $0.03 per Mbps a month). The first 25 Mbps of every hour is free. You can change it any time and the change applies live.
• Processing: $0.004 per encoded Mbps-hour, only when Hubfly space re-encodes (a transcoding ladder, a mixer). Pass-through is free. 20 Mbps-hours free a month.
• Bandwidth: $0.004 per GB sent to viewers and restream destinations. 50 GB free a month.
• Ingest, previews, and moving recordings to Hubfly space Storage are free. A stopped server costs nothing.

The speed presets when creating a stream server. 2,500 Mbps is sized for about 500 HD viewers at once and costs $74.83 a month if left on all month, so raise it for the show and lower it after.

The default 1080p ladder re-encodes three renditions: 1080p at 6 Mbps, 720p at 3 Mbps and 480p at 1.2 Mbps. That's 10.2 Mbps of processing while you're live.

The Add a channel dialog with the 1080p adaptive ladder. Each rendition shows the processing it bills while live.

The bills, side by side

Prices read on 4 November 2026. Each price links to the vendor's official page.

Monthly cost (4 × 2-hour 1080p shows)	50 viewers	500 viewers	2,000 viewers
Mux (plus quality, PAYG)	$0.00	$122.44	$754.24
Cloudflare Stream	$29.00	$245.00	$965.00
Amazon IVS (Standard channel, NA/EU)	$56.32	$419.20	$1,578.40
Hubfly space Streams	$3.49	$32.32	Doesn't fit one server

Above 250 Mbps of speed (about 58 viewers in this scenario), Hubfly space needs a real deposit first.

Where the numbers come from

50 viewers: 50 × 480 = 24,000 viewer-minutes, or 400 viewer-hours.

• Mux: input 480 min × $0.03125 = $15.00. Delivery is inside the free 100,000 minutes. Storage 480 min × $0.003 = $1.44. Total $16.44, fully covered by the $20 credit: $0.00.
• Cloudflare: 24,000 / 1,000 × $1 = $24, plus one $5 storage block = $29.00.
• IVS: input 8 h × $2 = $16. Output 400 h × (0.5 × $0.144 + 0.3 × $0.072 + 0.2 × $0.036 = $0.1008) = $40.32. Total $56.32.
• Hubfly space: average viewer bitrate 0.5 × 6.16 + 0.3 × 3.128 + 0.2 × 1.296 = 4.28 Mbps (video plus audio), or 1.925 GB per viewer-hour. Bandwidth 400 × 1.925 = 770 GB − 50 free = 720 GB × $0.004 = $2.88. Processing 10.2 Mbps × 8 h = 81.6 − 20 free = 61.6 Mbps-hours × $0.004 = $0.25. Speed: 50 × 4.28 = 214 Mbps peak, so set 250 Mbps (no deposit needed) for 3 hours around each show: (250 − 25) × $0.000041 × 12 h = $0.11. Recording 22.2 GB × $0.0112 per GB-month = $0.25. Total $3.49.

Mux stays at $0 until about 215 viewers (208 viewers use up the free minutes, and the rest of the $20 credit covers a few more). Hubfly space becomes the cheaper option at about 255 viewers.

500 viewers: 240,000 viewer-minutes, 4,000 viewer-hours.

• Mux: input $15.00. Delivery 240,000 − 100,000 free = 140,000 min × $0.0009 (half at the 1080p rate, half at 720p and below) = $126.00. Storage $1.44. Minus the $20 credit: $122.44.
• Cloudflare: 240 × $1 + $5 = $245.00.
• IVS: $16 + 4,000 × $0.1008 = $419.20.
• Hubfly space: bandwidth 4,000 × 1.925 = 7,700 GB − 50 = 7,650 GB × $0.004 = $30.60. Processing $0.25. Speed: peak 500 × 4.28 = 2,139 Mbps, so set 2,500 Mbps for 3 hours per show: (2,500 − 25) × $0.000041 × 12 h = $1.22. Recording $0.25. Total $32.32.

2,000 viewers: 960,000 viewer-minutes, 16,000 viewer-hours.

• Mux: $15 + (500,000 × $0.0009 + 360,000 × $0.000855) + $1.44 − $20 = $754.24 (Mux's second volume tier kicks in).
• Cloudflare: 960 × $1 + $5 = $965.00.
• IVS: $16 + 10,000 × $0.1008 + 6,000 × $0.0924 (second tier) = $1,578.40.
• Hubfly space: 2,000 viewers at 4.28 Mbps need about 8,555 Mbps at once. A stream server tops out at 2,500 Mbps. This audience doesn't fit one server, so don't use Hubfly space Streams for it today.

The number that decides it: cost per viewer

Strip away the fixed costs and look at what one more full-show viewer adds each month (8 hours watched):

Platform	Extra cost per viewer per month
Mux (after the free 100,000 minutes)	480 × $0.0009 = $0.43
Cloudflare Stream	480 × $0.001 = $0.48
Amazon IVS (NA/EU mix)	8 × $0.1008 = $0.81
Hubfly space Streams	8 × 1.925 GB × $0.004 = $0.06

Per-minute vendors don't care how many bits you send. Per-GB pricing does. So the useful question is: at what bitrate does per-GB stop being cheaper?

Mux's 1080p/720p mix works out to $0.054 per viewer-hour. At $0.004 per GB, that buys 13.5 GB an hour, which is a 30 Mbps stream. Against Cloudflare's $0.06 per viewer-hour, the break-even is 33 Mbps. Normal 1080p streams run at 4–8 Mbps, so per-GB pricing wins by a wide margin for typical video. If you stream at very high bitrates (4K, high-motion sports at 25+ Mbps), the gap closes.

Where each competitor wins

Pick on fit first, price second.

• Mux wins for small audiences and analytics. The 100,000 free delivery minutes plus the $20 credit make a small weekly show free. You also get free Mux Data and Mux Player, live captions (6,000 free minutes) and optional DRM.
• Cloudflare Stream wins on simplicity and reach. One price per minute, no bitrate math, free encoding, and delivery from Cloudflare's global network. If your viewers are spread across continents, that matters.
• Amazon IVS wins for interactive and AWS-heavy apps. Real-Time stages for multi-host shows, built-in chat with free messages per input hour, and tight integration with the rest of AWS.
• Hubfly space Streams wins on cost for mid-size audiences (about 255 to 500 concurrent viewers), and bundles things others charge for: restreaming to YouTube, Twitch and others (restream copies cost bandwidth only, about $0.09 per target per month here, versus $9.60 on Mux and $0.48 on Cloudflare), recording to Storage, and 24/7 playlists.

What Hubfly space Streams doesn't have yet, per its own docs: live captions, DRM, server-side ad insertion, a region picker and automatic failover between media nodes. Cloudflare, Mux and IVS deliver from large global networks; if your audience is spread across continents, weigh that before the price.

How to check these numbers yourself

Every figure above comes from a published price, so you can redo it in a spreadsheet:

1. Viewer-minutes = viewers × minutes watched per month. Multiply by each per-minute price, after Mux's free 100,000 minutes.
2. Viewer-hours by resolution for IVS: split viewers across Full HD, HD and SD, multiply by the regional rate.
3. GB for Hubfly space = viewer-hours × average Mbps × 3,600 / 8 / 1,000. Subtract 50 GB, multiply by $0.004.
4. Speed for Hubfly space = (cap − 25) × $0.000041 × hours at that cap. Size the cap at peak viewers × average Mbps, with headroom.
5. Processing = sum of the ladder's billed Mbps × live hours, minus 20, × $0.004.

Swap in your own audience size, show length and quality mix. If most of your viewers watch on phones at 720p, every vendor except Cloudflare gets cheaper.

What can go wrong

1. You leave speed at 2,500 Mbps all month. That's $74.08 a month instead of $1.22. Fix: raise speed an hour before the show and drop it back to 25 Mbps afterwards. The change applies live, and a server at 25 Mbps costs nothing for speed.
2. Your audience outgrows the speed cap. When traffic hits the cap, Hubfly space slows delivery instead of dropping viewers, and raises a speed.throttled alert. Fix: size the cap at peak viewers × average bitrate, with headroom, up to the 2,500 Mbps maximum. Above 250 Mbps Hubfly space needs a real deposit first, so add it before the event, not during it.
3. The 1080p ladder is rejected. The default ladder needs 10.2 Mbps of processing, and new servers start with an 8 Mbps processing cap. Outputs over the cap don't start (and aren't billed). Fix: set the processing cap to 12 or more when you create the server, or in its Settings. On Mux, a similar surprise is that live needs the plus quality level, not basic.

Takeaway

• Up to about 215 viewers a show: Mux, because it's free.
• About 215 to 255 viewers: Mux and Hubfly space cost about the same; pick on features.
• About 255 to 500 concurrent viewers, mostly in one region: Hubfly space Streams, at roughly $0.06 per extra viewer per month versus $0.43–$0.81 elsewhere.
• Larger, global, or needs captions or DRM: Mux or Cloudflare Stream. IVS if you're building interactive multi-host shows on AWS.

Go further on Hubfly space

• Restream your show to YouTube, Twitch and Kick from the same server, for the cost of bandwidth.
• Record every show to Hubfly space Storage and publish it as on-demand HLS video.
• Run the website that embeds the player on Hubfly space Cell, next to your stream server, so your whole project lives in one place.

Moving from Mux, Cloudflare Stream or IVS? Point your encoder at a Hubfly space RTMPS or SRT ingest URL, swap the player's HLS link, and run your next show on the free tier first. Start free on Hubfly space and see the speed price before you confirm.