What counts as a stored minute?

One minute of an uploaded original or a recorded live broadcast. Deleted videos, failed encodes and the renditions Stream builds from your upload are not counted.

What counts as a delivered minute?

Any minute of video segments sent to a viewer through Stream's player, an HLS or DASH manifest, an MP4 download or a live output.

Does Cloudflare Stream have a free tier?

No. Cloudflare's Stream product page leaves the free column empty for both stored and delivered minutes, so the smallest bill is one storage block plus whatever is watched.

Do I pay for a whole block if I only store 20 minutes?

Yes. Capacity is sold 1,000 minutes at a time, so a short library pays for a full block, and minute 1,001 means buying a second.

Does a viewer who quits early cost the full video?

No, only the segments they received, including what the player had buffered ahead of them.

Is there a discount at high volume?

Cloudflare points accounts storing or delivering millions of minutes a month to its sales team for volume pricing. It publishes no discounted rate.

Cloudflare Stream pricing

Summarize with:

Stream charges $5 a month for each prepaid block of 1,000 stored minutes and $1 per 1,000 minutes sent to viewers, and it has no free tier.

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

The two meters on a Stream bill

Every Stream invoice comes down to these lines. The right-hand column applies them to one 20-minute video.

What is billed	Rate	20-min video
Stored minutes	$5 per 1,000, prepaid	1 block a month
Delivered minutes	$1 per 1,000, post-paid	$0.02 a full play
Upload and encoding	Free	$0
Bandwidth	Inside delivery	$0

Stored time is the length of the original upload, rounded up to the nearest second. The extra quality levels Stream encodes and the MP4 download files it generates use no storage.

Read the full Cloudflare Stream review

Cloudflare Stream pricing has two meters

Storage is measured in minutes of running time, whatever the file size. Delivery is measured in minutes of video that viewers receive. Uploading, encoding and bandwidth carry no separate charge.

Prices as of 16 October 2026, from the vendor's pricing page.

Stored vs delivered minutes

Storage is capacity you buy ahead. Each block holds 1,000 minutes for the month, so a 20-minute VSL and ten 3-minute testimonial clips (50 minutes in all) still fit in one. When the blocks are full, Stream refuses new uploads and new live streams until you buy another block or delete videos.

Delivery is billed after the month ends, from the four-second segments each viewer actually receives. A visitor who leaves at minute five costs five minutes. Segments the player preloads or buffers count, while a replay served from the browser's cache does not.

Cloudflare sets out both rules in its Stream pricing documentation.

My call on Stream for sales video

The bill is easy to forecast: plays times average minutes watched, divided by 1,000, plus the storage block. For a funnel doing a few thousand plays a month, that lands in the tens of dollars. Because storage comes in small blocks, you never pay for a big tier you only half use.

Heavy traffic is where the delivery rate hurts. A 10,000-play month of a 20-minute VSL watched 35% of the way comes to about $75 on Stream and roughly $4 on Bunny Stream's Volume tier, which bills per gigabyte. Stream's price also buys hosting and delivery only: the pricing page lists no analytics or marketing tier, so timed CTAs, viewer retention reports and split tests come from whatever player you put on top.

To set Stream beside per-play and per-GB hosts with your own numbers, use our video hosting cost calculator.

One 20-minute VSL, three traffic levels

The table assumes every viewer watches all 20 minutes, which is the ceiling. Real VSL audiences drop off, so delivery, and the total, will sit below these lines.

Full plays	Delivered min.	Storage block	Delivery	Monthly total
1,000 plays	20,000	1 block	$20	$25
10,000 plays	200,000	1 block	$200	$205
100,000 plays	2,000,000	1 block	$2,000	$2,005

With a more typical 35% average watch time, 10,000 plays deliver 70,000 minutes: $70 of delivery plus the storage block, or $75 for the month.

Cloudflare's plans page also lists an allowance for Pro and Business accounts: 100 stored minutes and 10,000 delivered minutes. That is bundled with those paid website plans rather than a free Stream tier.

What works

Genuinely cheap and simple to reason about. Two meters only, minutes stored and minutes delivered, with encoding, upload and bandwidth included. 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.
Delivery is billed per minute watched, which removes gigabyte and bitrate calculations from the invoice.

What to watch

It is infrastructure. You build or add the in-video CTAs, lead capture, split tests and sales attribution.
The per-delivered-minute model penalizes the type of 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, while premium studio DRM requires another route. Forum users report that shared signed links get passed to third-party players, and configuring the keys causes confusion.
Stream starts with a prepaid storage block and assumes you can code. The API-led workflow lacks a drag-and-drop marketing dashboard, which raises the setup burden for a non-technical seller.

Pricing questions

What counts as a stored minute?: One minute of an uploaded original or a recorded live broadcast. Deleted videos, failed encodes and the renditions Stream builds from your upload are not counted.
What counts as a delivered minute?: Any minute of video segments sent to a viewer through Stream's player, an HLS or DASH manifest, an MP4 download or a live output.
Does Cloudflare Stream have a free tier?: No. Cloudflare's Stream product page leaves the free column empty for both stored and delivered minutes, so the smallest bill is one storage block plus whatever is watched.
Do I pay for a whole block if I only store 20 minutes?: Yes. Capacity is sold 1,000 minutes at a time, so a short library pays for a full block, and minute 1,001 means buying a second.
Does a viewer who quits early cost the full video?: No, only the segments they received, including what the player had buffered ahead of them.
Is there a discount at high volume?: Cloudflare points accounts storing or delivering millions of minutes a month to its sales team for volume pricing. It publishes no discounted rate.

What we read

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