Cloudflare Stream pricing: simple per-minute model, edge delivery included
Cloudflare Stream's pricing — flat per-minute storage + delivery rates, no separate compute fees, and the all-in cost story that includes the CDN.
Cloudflare Stream's pricing is the simplest in the category. Per-minute stored + per-minute delivered, with the CDN delivery included in those rates. No separate compute charges, no tier transitions, no reserved-capacity commitments. For engineering teams who want predictable budgeting, this transparency is meaningful.
What Cloudflare Stream actually has
Storage: $5 per 1,000 minutes stored per month. Delivery: $1 per 1,000 minutes streamed per month. Encoding: included in the storage fee — you pay for the resulting stored asset, not for the encoding compute. CDN delivery: included in the delivery fee — Cloudflare's global edge network delivers to viewers without separate CDN charges. Live: $1 per 1,000 minutes streamed (same as VOD delivery rate). Subscription tiers add base monthly fees but provide bundled minutes at lower per-minute rates. Pricing is published transparently at cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/pricing.
Where it's the right fit
Predictable budgeting — engineering teams can model the bill without sales-led negotiation. Operators wanting CDN + encoding + storage as one line item rather than three vendor contracts. Smaller-volume workloads where the simplicity outweighs negotiated discounts. Cloudflare-platform-resident workloads where Stream's pricing fits the existing Cloudflare bill.
Where the gaps show up
At very large scale, the per-minute model lacks the flexibility of negotiated commit-volume contracts. Cloudflare Stream's storage rate ($5/1,000 minutes) is meaningfully more expensive than R2 ($0.015/GB) for raw storage — the markup pays for the encoding bundling, but for storage-heavy workflows the math is sometimes uncomfortable. The lack of reserved-capacity options means you can't commit to volume for discount.
Pricing implications
Realistic monthly bills: a 100,000-minute library streaming 200,000 minutes/month ≈ $700/month. At 1M-minute library streaming 5M-minutes/month, ≈ $10K/month. Comparable to Mux at small scale, often cheaper at mid-scale due to bundled CDN.
MpegFlow self-hosted licensing is flat-fee per cluster — different model entirely. Cloudflare Stream is fully managed; MpegFlow self-hosted gives you pipeline control + cost convergence to hardware bill. For teams wanting managed-everything with predictable per-minute billing, Cloudflare Stream is the right call. For teams needing pipeline visibility or self-host options, MpegFlow.
- pricing
- cloudflare-stream
- Cost optimization