What live streaming actually costs
Four things generate cost: how many sources come in, how many go out, whether you encode in the browser or on a GPU, and how much recording you keep. Inputs and outputs are five dollars a month each.
Most pricing pages tell you what a plan costs and leave you to guess which one you need. That is backwards. The useful exercise is to work out what your show actually consumes, because once you have those four numbers the cost follows and the plan question answers itself.
Inputs: what comes in
An input is a source arriving at the studio — a camera, a hardware encoder, a screen share, a remote guest. A single-camera talking-head show needs one. A two-camera church service with slides needs three. A concert with three cameras and a desk feed needs four.
Each additional input is five dollars a month, which makes the second camera a small decision rather than a plan upgrade. That matters because the second camera is usually the largest single improvement available to a one-camera production.
Outputs: where it goes
An output is a destination you publish to. Two platforms is two; adding your own website is three. Each additional one is also five dollars a month, priced individually so you can test whether a channel repays the effort of being there and remove it if it does not.
This is the number that scales with ambition rather than with production complexity, and it is the one people most often over-buy at the start.
Encoding time: free, or metered
Browser encoding is free everywhere. The GPU path is the metered one: an allowance of hours comes with each plan and time past it is charged hourly.
So the question is not which is better but how many hours a month you run. A weekly ninety-minute show is a different proposition from a daily programme or a channel that streams continuously, and the schedule decides this far more than the production does. Work it out against your calendar rather than against a typical show.
Storage: the one that grows quietly
Recordings are billed per gigabyte per month for as long as you keep them, at a rate that depends on your plan. The size is arithmetic: an hour at 1080p30 is roughly 2.7 GB, so a four-hour meeting is around 11 GB and a two-hour concert at 1080p60 is around 8.
This is the only one of the four that compounds. A weekly show adds to it every week, and an archive kept indefinitely is a bill that grows indefinitely. Decide early whether the master lives here permanently or moves to cheaper archival storage after publication — and if you are a public body with a statutory retention period, that period is your number, not a preference.
Put it to work on a real show
Put your four numbers in and get the monthly figure directly, rather than reverse-engineering it from a plan table.
Where per-unit pricing stops being a detail and becomes how you quote a client before the engagement rather than after it.
Storage is the cost that matters most when a retention schedule is measured in years and set by law.
Related guides
Send one encode up and let the fan-out happen downstream. Multistreaming from your own computer sends a separate copy to each platform, so four destinations cost four times your upload. One encode upstream costs the same regardless.
For 1080p30, about 6 Mbps. For 1080p60, about 9. For 720p30, about 3, and 720p60, about 4.5. Frame rate drives the number far harder than resolution does, and your upload has to sustain it, not peak at it.
Take audio from the sound desk, not the camera. That single change improves a worship stream more than any camera upgrade. Then add a locked wide shot, and a second camera on whoever is speaking, in that order.