How much does it really cost to host business video in 2026?

You have a few videos: a product demo, a walkthrough for your docs, a hero video for the landing page. What should hosting them cost?

The honest answer is a range from free to a few hundred dollars a month, and the price depends on a few things that are easy to estimate once you know their names.

The two meters that matter

Almost every video host charges for some version of two things.

• Storage: how much video you keep. Measured in gigabytes, or in minutes of video.
• Delivery: how much video people watch. Measured in gigabytes of bandwidth, or in minutes streamed.

For a business with a modest library, storage is small. Delivery is what grows when a video does well, and it is the number to look at before you pick a host.

Minutes are easier to reason about than gigabytes. A 5-minute demo watched 2,000 times is 10,000 minutes streamed. You do not need to know the bitrate.

The three kinds of host

Free: YouTube

YouTube costs nothing. The trade-offs are the ones you already know. Embeds can show related videos and carry YouTube branding, and an unlisted video is open to anyone who has the link, so it is not access control. If those do not bother you for a given video, free is hard to beat.

Raw infrastructure: Cloudflare Stream, Mux, Bunny, api.video

These charge for what you use, and the prices are low. From each vendor's own pricing page, checked in October 2026:

• Cloudflare Stream: $5 per month per 1,000 stored minutes, and $1 per 1,000 delivered minutes.
• Mux: $0.003 per stored minute per month, and $0.001 per delivered minute after 100,000 free delivery minutes a month.
• Bunny Stream: storage from $0.01 per GB and delivery from $0.005 per GB, with free encoding.
• api.video: from $0.00285 per minute stored and $0.0017 per minute delivered.

At a small scale, say 500 stored minutes and 10,000 streamed, that works out to roughly $12.50 a month on Cloudflare Stream, and less on Mux, because its free delivery allowance covers the whole 10,000 minutes.

The catch is that these are building blocks. You write the upload flow, the account and library, the embed, and the signed-URL code for private videos. If you are a developer who enjoys that, it is the cheapest route. If you are not, the cost is your time.

Finished products: Vimeo, Wistia, SproutVideo, Modo and others

These give you a dashboard, a player and embeds. They differ in what they charge for.

• Wistia is aimed at marketing teams. Its Business plan is $79 a month billed annually, with 1 TB of bandwidth, three users and $25 for each extra user. It adds lead forms, heatmaps and webinars. Checked on its pricing page in October 2026.
• SproutVideo publishes plans from $15 a month (or $12 billed annually) up to $295, with overage rates per GB. Checked October 2026.
• Vimeo has a free tier and low entry plans. Second-hand sources put them around $12 and $25 a month billed annually, but we could not read Vimeo's live pricing page, so check it yourself. Vimeo is cheaper than Modo on sticker price.
• Modo is $39, $99 or $199 a month, by minutes stored and minutes streamed, with $2 per 1,000 extra minutes streamed and no per-seat pricing.

Two things that change the real price

Bandwidth limits and overage. A low sticker price can come with a ceiling. Some hosts reportedly set a bandwidth threshold on self-serve plans and ask you to move to a custom plan beyond it. Read the terms for any host you pick and look for a published overage rate. A published rate lets you work out the worst case in advance.

Seats. Per-user pricing is fine for a team of one and can be the biggest line item for a team of ten. If several people upload videos, count the seats.

A worked example

Say you have 30 videos averaging 4 minutes, which is 120 minutes stored. One demo is on your pricing page and gets 1,500 views a month, averaging 3 minutes watched. Your other videos together get 1,000 minutes a month.

• Minutes stored: 120.
• Minutes streamed: 1,500 x 3 = 4,500, plus 1,000 = 5,500 a month.

On Modo that fits inside Starter ($39). On Cloudflare Stream directly it would be about $0.60 for storage and $5.50 for delivery. On Mux the delivery is inside the free allowance. On YouTube it is free. On Vimeo's entry plans it is likely a lot less than $39, if the plan fits what you need.

So which should you pick? It depends on what you value.

How to choose

• If the budget is zero and a clean embed or access control does not matter, use YouTube.
• If you write code and want the lowest cost, use Cloudflare Stream, Mux or Bunny directly.
• If you want a marketing platform with lead capture, look at Wistia.
• If you want a low-priced general host, look at Vimeo and SproutVideo, and read the limits.
• If you want a simple hosted product that you can also run from your AI agent, with a published overage rate and no seats, that is what we built Modo for. It costs more than the cheapest options, and we think the simplicity is worth it for some people. Not everyone.

Prices change, so treat any number here as a starting point and confirm it on the vendor's page before deciding. There is more detail on our comparison pages.