Is there a free plan or trial?

Check the plans above; we note any free trial and the date we last checked it.

Will the price change as I scale?

Often, yes. Read the billing basis above: metering on plays, bandwidth or storage means your bill moves with usage, so the headline price is only the starting point.

Cloudflare Stream pricing

What Cloudflare Stream costs, what each plan is metered on, and what to expect as your traffic grows.

By Dominic Reyes, Lead reviewer. Edited by the Play That Sells desk.

What Cloudflare Stream costs

Usage-based, two dimensions only. Storage is prepaid at $5 per 1,000 minutes of video stored per month (so the practical floor is about $5/mo once you store anything). Delivery is post-paid at $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. Ingress, encoding and bandwidth are free. No per-seat or plan tiers. Media Transformations (clipping, resizing, thumbnails) bill at $0.50 per 1,000 unique operations after a free 5,000/month. No standing free allocation for Stream itself.

Prices checked 27 September 2026. Verify on the vendor site before you buy.

What works

Genuinely cheap and simple to reason about. Two dimensions only: $5 per 1,000 minutes stored and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with encoding, upload and bandwidth included. No seats, no tiers, no separate egress bill. Developers on Hacker News call it an honest paid platform.
The reliability and reach of Cloudflare's own network. Stream runs on the same infrastructure that moves a big share of the world's web traffic, so playback holds up globally and under load without you managing a CDN.
One API from upload to playback, for on-demand and live. RTMP and SRT ingest, automatic adaptive-bitrate HLS and DASH output, a built-in player or your own. A developer can wire video into a product in an afternoon.
No surprise bandwidth math. Delivery is billed per minute watched, not per gigabyte, so a large file costs no more to serve than a short one of the same length.

What to watch

It is infrastructure, not a selling tool. There are no in-video CTAs, no lead-capture forms, no split tests, and no analytics that tie a play to a sale. Everything that makes the clip actually sell, you build or bolt on yourself.
The per-delivered-minute model bites the exact content this audience runs. A talking-head VSL or evergreen webinar at low bitrate costs the same per delivered minute as 4K, so a cheap-to-produce clip with a big audience can get disproportionately expensive. Do the math for your view count before you commit.
Content protection is do-it-yourself. Stream uses signed URLs and token auth, not studio DRM like Widevine or FairPlay. Forum users report shared signed links get passed to third-party players, and setting the keys up trips people up. Fine for casual gating, thin for premium course video.
No free tier for Stream itself, and it assumes you can code. Once you store a video you buy at least one $5 storage block, there is no drag-and-drop marketing dashboard, and the whole product is built to be driven by an API. A non-technical seller will feel that.

Pricing questions

How much does Cloudflare Stream cost?: Usage-based, two dimensions only. Storage is prepaid at $5 per 1,000 minutes of video stored per month (so the practical floor is about $5/mo once you store anything). Delivery is post-paid at $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. Ingress, encoding and bandwidth are free. No per-seat or plan tiers. Media Transformations (clipping, resizing, thumbnails) bill at $0.50 per 1,000 unique operations after a free 5,000/month. No standing free allocation for Stream itself.
Is there a free plan or trial?: Check the plans above; we note any free trial and the date we last checked it.
Will the price change as I scale?: Often, yes. Read the billing basis above: metering on plays, bandwidth or storage means your bill moves with usage, so the headline price is only the starting point.