How Much Does Video Hosting Really Cost for a Patreon Creator?

Estimate storage and delivery from your own audience, then find practical savings without promising that a cheap server provides unlimited streaming.

RedShoreMedia · Reviewed 2026-10-29

Start with watched minutes, not follower count

A thousand followers are not a thousand complete views of every video. Estimate how many people start each release and how much they watch. Keep library duration separate from monthly delivered duration. Your archive can be large while current viewing is small, or a single new episode can generate most of the month’s traffic.

For illustration, consider a library containing 100 videos of ten minutes each: 1,000 stored minutes. Ten thousand delivered minutes represent 1,000 full ten-minute plays, or a different combination of shorter visits. These are hypothetical workloads, not usage measurements or a guaranteed bill for a particular account.

Translate minutes into bytes

At an average delivered bitrate of 3 Mbps, 10,000 minutes correspond to about 225 decimal GB: minutes × 60 × Mbps ÷ 8 ÷ 1,000. The same bitrate gives about 22.5 GB for the 1,000-minute library. Actual adaptive renditions, audio, originals, replication, buffering and protocol overhead change storage and traffic; do not treat this simplified model as an invoice forecast.

Under the published Cloudflare rates, 1,000 stored minutes plus 10,000 delivered minutes cost approximately $15 for those two dimensions. At 100,000 delivered minutes the same library is approximately $105. With an illustrative Bunny setup of one 22.5 GB stored copy and $0.01/GB delivery, 225 GB delivered plus storage from $0.01/GB totals about $2.48. The lowest Volume delivery rate would change that model, as would additional stored renditions and geography.

Include every separate bill

These estimates exclude taxes, optional products and RedShoreMedia. Its Free plan includes 25 saved videos; Creator and Business are separate software plans. On a VPS, budget for the machine, included transfer allowance, excess transfer, disk, backups, monitoring and administration. A low advertised VPS price is not evidence that video bandwidth is unmetered or suitable for your audience.

Concurrency matters too. Fifty viewers receiving 3 Mbps require roughly 150 Mbps before overhead. A machine may have enough disk and still deliver poorly during a release spike. Moving to a different region can make a nominally cheaper host slower for most supporters.

Save where the viewer benefits

Avoid distributing huge editing masters as the default stream. Choose suitable delivery encodes and adaptive qualities where useful, keep an appropriate archive and remove abandoned duplicate renditions only after checking backups. Monitor actual provider usage after each release. Do not lower quality blindly: a readable tutorial or fast-motion clip may need more bitrate than a static talking-head recording.

Review your first month’s bill against the model, then change one variable at a time. Native provider workflows may already satisfy your needs; use RedShoreMedia when its player and workspace features add value. Savings come from the complete workflow, not merely switching the logo on a player.

Illustrative monthly workload

Delivered minutes	Approx. traffic at 3 Mbps	Cloudflare total incl. 1,000 stored minutes
10,000	225 GB	$15
50,000	1,125 GB	$55
100,000	2,250 GB	$105

Illustration only: USD before taxes, optional services and RedShoreMedia. Actual billing differs with renditions, regions, buffering and usage.

Sources and further reading

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