m3u8.com · total cost

What your service would cost to run on AWS

Describe your library and how it is watched. The page prices a month of running it on bokeh and AWS, every line of the bill: CloudFront, S3, Lambda making segments on demand, and the S3 cache that keeps a segment only while that is cheaper than making it again. Price the same service on Cloudflare.

Minutes in the library Minutes added a month Hours watched a month The top 10% of titles get of viewing

Ladder AVC only AVC and HEVC

Viewers whose players take HEVC:

Advanced

Average title, minutes Average viewing, minutes Nobody watches of the titles Year-old titles are watched as much as new ones Segment length, seconds The CDN keeps an unrequested segment, hours A second of a viewer's waiting is worth

One 8 s segment, as m3u8.com measured it on the day beside its name.

1080p60 carried 2026-10-01MBwait, s

720p60 avc1 2026-10-02MBwait, s

480p60 avc1 2026-10-02MBwait, s

1080p60 hvc1 2026-10-01MBwait, s

720p60 hvc1 2026-10-01MBwait, s

480p60 hvc1 2026-10-01MBwait, s

stereo AAC 2026-10-01MBwait, s

Mezzanines in S3, GB per hour of video

Month by month

Each month's cost over the next two years, as the library grows by the minutes added a month.

Where the money goes

line	a month

How the cache decides what to keep

rendition	a viewing's first segment	a later segment

Your long tail

answered by the CDNkept in S3made again by a Lambdanever watched

The library's minutes, most watched first, and how often each is watched a month. Each strip below the curve is one rendition, coloured by where most of its requests there are answered.

What it assumes

A segment's size, encode cost and wait scale with its length from the 8 s measured; a production's fixed costs do not.
The library is titles of the average length under Advanced. A viewing starts at a title's first segment, and viewers leave at random, so the share still watching falls exponentially, with the average viewing under Advanced.
A viewer waits only for a viewing's first segment: prefetch makes the later ones ahead.
The share under Advanced of the titles is never watched. Among the rest of the titles of the same age, viewing spreads lognormally. A title's viewing falls by the same share each month, to the share under Advanced at a year. The top tenth's share is the whole library's, ages included.
Content arrives evenly and stays, and the library was built at the same rate. The tier makes a kept segment of new content once, when it is first asked for.
Month by month, the library grows by the minutes added and viewing stays at the hours given.
Requests arrive at random, and the CDN drops a segment the hours above after its last request.
Viewing splits 60/30/10 across 1080p, 720p and 480p, and audio goes with every view.
Sizes and waits are what m3u8.com measured on 2026-10-01 and 2026-10-02 on Cloudflare's 4-vCPU containers. A Lambda makes a segment in that wait; bokeh's time on Lambda is not measured.
Prices are AWS's list prices in us-east-1 as of 2026-09-30, after the always-free tiers. AWS counts a GB as 2³⁰ bytes.
CloudFront is the cheaper of pay-as-you-go and the smallest flat-rate plan whose allowances cover the month.
Each CDN miss invokes one 10240 MB function through its URL. The function streams its answer: the first 6 MB at full speed and at no charge, the rest at 2 MB/s and $0.008 a GB.
With the S3 cache, an invocation spends an estimated 0.1 s on its records and S3. Each invocation writes an estimated 0.4 KB of logs.
A segment made again reads its mezzanine from S3 4 times. The mezzanines are in S3 Standard.
The function runs outside a VPC, so no NAT gateway carries its traffic.
Not counted: cold starts, the playlists and init segments, uploading and analysing content (S3 events, SQS and the analysis), and the S3 cache's evaluation.