Engineer at Stream here and I'm really not the guy to talk to about pricing. However, I can tell you that our features that are hardest to implement in a scala

Engineer at Stream here and I'm really not the guy to talk to about pricing. However, I can tell you that our features that are hardest to implement in a scalabale way are aggregated feeds (e.g. one message with "tom watched 10 videos") and custom ranking (reddit/HN style ordering with time decay and points). If you're feed system doesn't have either of these features it might indeed be possible to do it cheaper than our more expensive plans. However keep in mind, a lot of the cost is in the availability and reliability of our service. Basically for every type of server we run (including databases), we need to run at least two to be able to stay online in case one dies. Finally building and maintaining a feed system is not cheap in terms of developer cost (try finding a dev for $10k a year).