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Question: I want to make a live video streaming website a la Twitch.tv. How much would CloudFlare charge me to stream 8 Mbps to ~80,000 viewers for 4 hours?

jrockway 5y ago
I think this is the sort of thing you want to ask their sales team. I thought about doing this a while ago, after I left my job with an ISP. I would just have bought transit from them (and maybe made them regret their 10Gbps for $1000/month plan ;)
mike_d 5y ago
Almost $20,000. 19,200,000 minutes at $1 per 1,000 minutes. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016450871-Billing-for-Cloudflare-Stream https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001645087...
- busymom0 5y ago
  There's probably some bulk deals if you get in touch with their sales team?
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    Yes, you could. The last time someone I know spoke to them, the standard enterprise plans started at $5000/mo and got you some very nice freebies. Cloudflare's also announced managed WebRTC APIs (in closed beta) which look promising for creating meeting rooms ala Zoom.us. I imagine, these are already available to tech-shops on enterprise plans. Though, mux.com is decent too, from what I've heard; for certain workloads, LiveStream and Vimeo might be cheaper. There's Peer5, PeerTube, and BitTorrent in the P2P space (among many such solutions).
    - busymom0 5y ago
      > mux.com First time hearing of them (due to my own ignorance probably). Any details on them?
      - ignoramous 5y ago
        I have never used mux.com (I have used Vimeo, AWS Elemental, and Cloudflare Streams in the past), but they are fairly well-known as the founders created the very popular video.js library. One key thing that differentiates mux.com from others is they're multi-cdn unlike AWS Elemental / Cloudflare Streams, say.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I want to pile up: Why is it that bandwidth today is so expensive for things like video? Is there some kind of a good-ol-boys network of companies that are preventing from making bandwidth so cheap its not worth metering? What does the future hold? I am asking this because YouTube seems to have a massive monopoly both on technology as well as content/audience/network-effects. Even if you can get all the people of Youtube to shift over, you still need to solve the problem of bandwidth and the costs associated with that.
- thejosh 5y ago
  Bandwidth is only expensive through cloud providers, to try and squeeze you for it. If you go bare metal, dedicated, or just rack your own servers you can peer with a lot of providers and get essentially free bandwidth.

jrockway 5y ago

I think this is the sort of thing you want to ask their sales team. I thought about doing this a while ago, after I left my job with an ISP. I would just have bought transit from them (and maybe made them regret their 10Gbps for $1000/month plan ;)

mike_d 5y ago

Almost $20,000. 19,200,000 minutes at $1 per 1,000 minutes. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016450871-Billing-for-Cloudflare-Stream https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001645087...

busymom0 5y ago
There's probably some bulk deals if you get in touch with their sales team?
- ignoramous 5y ago
  Yes, you could. The last time someone I know spoke to them, the standard enterprise plans started at $5000/mo and got you some very nice freebies. Cloudflare's also announced managed WebRTC APIs (in closed beta) which look promising for creating meeting rooms ala Zoom.us. I imagine, these are already available to tech-shops on enterprise plans. Though, mux.com is decent too, from what I've heard; for certain workloads, LiveStream and Vimeo might be cheaper. There's Peer5, PeerTube, and BitTorrent in the P2P space (among many such solutions).
  - busymom0 5y ago
    > mux.com First time hearing of them (due to my own ignorance probably). Any details on them?
    - ignoramous 5y ago
      I have never used mux.com (I have used Vimeo, AWS Elemental, and Cloudflare Streams in the past), but they are fairly well-known as the founders created the very popular video.js library. One key thing that differentiates mux.com from others is they're multi-cdn unlike AWS Elemental / Cloudflare Streams, say.

systemvoltage 5y ago

I want to pile up: Why is it that bandwidth today is so expensive for things like video? Is there some kind of a good-ol-boys network of companies that are preventing from making bandwidth so cheap its not worth metering? What does the future hold? I am asking this because YouTube seems to have a massive monopoly both on technology as well as content/audience/network-effects. Even if you can get all the people of Youtube to shift over, you still need to solve the problem of bandwidth and the costs associated with that.

thejosh 5y ago
Bandwidth is only expensive through cloud providers, to try and squeeze you for it. If you go bare metal, dedicated, or just rack your own servers you can peer with a lot of providers and get essentially free bandwidth.