Answer
How much does video hosting cost?
Read the meter, not the sticker price.
Hosts do not sell the same unit. One counts the gigabytes you keep, one counts the gigabytes your viewers pull, one counts the people on your team. The meter, not the headline price, decides what a busy month costs you. Here is what each major host counts, what it charges, and the arithmetic for a working filmmaker.
Video hosting for filmmakers · 5 GB free · Paid plans from USD 9/month
By uncompressed.io · Updated September 2026
The short answer
Where your bill lands
depends on what the host counts.
There is no single price for video hosting, because the hosts are not selling the same unit. One charges for the gigabytes you keep. One charges for the gigabytes your viewers pull. One charges per person who can log in, and hands you storage as a side effect. One charges nothing and takes the quality ceiling instead.
$0
Bandwidth line
Plans have storage, seat and caption allowances; streaming has no extra charge here. Views, uploads and viewers are uncapped on every plan, including the free one.
5 GB
Free to start
Starter is free with 5 GB of hot storage, one film at a time, and the protected review path included.
$40
Per TB hot, a month
The published rate for storage past your plan. Cold storage is $20 per terabyte a month on Max and Studio.
$25
Per extra seat, a month
Or $300 a year. A seat carries no storage of its own, on any paid plan.
Three meters cover almost every plan on the market. Storage counts what you keep online. Bandwidth, which some hosts call delivery, counts what goes out to viewers. Seats count the people who can log in. A plan can meter one of the three, or all of them.
Which meter a host uses decides whether the bill is predictable. A storage meter moves when you upload, and you decide when that happens. A bandwidth meter moves when your work gets watched, which you do not decide, and it moves hardest in the week a film does well. A seat meter moves when you hire. Read a pricing page for the meter first. The headline number only tells you what the quiet month costs.
uncompressed.io includes streaming; storage, seats and caption allowances depend on the plan. The Terms state that plans include storage, seat and caption allowances and that there are no bandwidth caps; the pricing page carries uncapped views, uploads and viewers on every plan, free included. The one thing you choose is how many gigabytes stay online. That choice is the whole bill.
Storage
The count of what you keep online. It only moves when you upload or archive, so you can forecast it from your shooting calendar. It is the meter here, the meter on Wistia, and half the meter on Vimeo.
Bandwidth
The count of what leaves for viewers. Wistia counts a play, the player and thumbnail loading, your own internal views, and a download. Vimeo counts playing a video, loading the player and thumbnail, downloading, video traffic and live streaming. A good month for your film is a big month on this meter.
Seats
The count of people with a login. On Frame.io it is the whole price, and storage arrives attached to each member. Here a seat is $25 a month or $300 a year and carries no storage at all.
What each host counts
The meter, the price,
and what it charges for it.
Everything in this table is taken from the host’s own pricing page or help center. Where a figure is not published on a page we could read, the cell says so rather than guessing. That is why several Vimeo price cells are empty: its plan prices are drawn in the browser and its help articles carry storage and bandwidth but no dollar amounts.
Sources and dates in the list below. Vimeo figures come from its help center, dated by each article's own last update, because the plan prices on vimeo.com are rendered in the browser and could not be read; the only Vimeo subscription price on a readable official page is Studio. Vimeo's 2 TB Starter storage cap applies to accounts created from 17 June 2024 onward; older Starter accounts are described instead as capped at 60 videos with up to 250 GB per video. Wistia's pricing page prints its Business and Business + Signals figures both as a monthly price and as a monthly price billed annually, so the toggle state is ambiguous from the page text and no separate month-to-month figure is published here. Frame.io advertises 13 percent off annual billing but prints no annual dollar amount. Cells marked not published mean the figure was absent from the page fetched, not that the feature is absent.
Two lines deserve their exact wording. Vimeo publishes a monthly bandwidth threshold of 2 TB, measured as 2,000 GB, and states plainly that it generally does not enforce that limit by stopping an account’s ability to stream. Enforcement follows a pattern rather than a single busy month: exceeding 2 TB at least twice in the past twelve months, or exceeding 10 TB once in the past twelve. On the Studio plan the meter changes shape entirely, to 36 TB of bandwidth a year with no monthly cap. A blanket claim that Vimeo cuts you off at 2 TB a month is not true of every plan, and the honest question is whether your traffic is the repeating kind that starts a conversation with sales.
Frame.io is the clearest example of a seat meter. Its price is per member per month, and storage arrives with the people: 2 TB included on Pro and 3 TB on Team, plus 2 TB for each additional member. That is generous when the team is real. It is expensive when it is not, because a two-person shop and a twelve-person post house pay very differently for the same library.
The arithmetic
What a working year costs
with included streaming.
Three libraries, sized the way a working filmmaker actually grows: a first year of finished deliverables, a steady library of films clients still open, and a busy studio keeping masters off-site as well. Every figure below is a published rate, not an estimate. What none of the columns contain is a line that moves when someone presses play.
Rates: Starter free with 5 GB hot; Lite $9 a month or $90 a year, 100 GB hot; Pro $25 or $250, 500 GB hot; Max $75 or $750, 1.5 TB hot plus 1 TB cold and 3 seats; Studio $250 or $2,500, 2 TB hot plus 2 TB cold and 5 seats. Storage past a plan is $40 per terabyte hot and $20 per terabyte cold, a month. Cold storage is available on Max and Studio. Annual billing is ten months' price for twelve. The busy column also prices out on Studio at $370 a month, which is the better buy only when the five included seats are worth $155.
Three rows stay flat all the way across. The bandwidth line is zero, because there is no bandwidth meter. The per-viewer charge is zero, because viewers are not counted. And the plan does not move when a film does well: the only event that changes the bill is you putting more gigabytes online.
The busy column is the one worth sitting with, because it shows what the second meter does. That studio is keeping 7.5 TB in total. Kept entirely online it would be the $75 plan plus 6 TB of hot blocks, $315 a month. Split the way the library actually works, with 3.5 TB online and 4 TB archived at half the rate, it is $215. The $100 a month difference is a decision about temperature, not about traffic, and you can make it per file. The mechanics of that split, including what an archived master can and cannot do while it sits there, are in hot vs cold storage for footage. If you are trying to work out which column you are in before you upload anything, size your own library first in how much storage does 4K video take and video storage for filmmakers.
Honest framing
Four cases where
the right answer is somewhere else.
Original-file hosting is not the best fit for every job. These are the cases where we would tell you to stay where you are, and why.
Stay on YouTube
Free, public, unmatched reach, with an upload ceiling of 256 GB or 12 hours per file, whichever is less, and a 15-minute limit until the account is verified. If the job is getting a public film seen and nobody is paying for fidelity or access control, YouTube is the answer. Cost is never the argument against it.
Stay on Wistia
Its real product is marketing: turnstiles, lead capture and per-viewer analytics on a company site, which is why Business + Signals is priced at $329 a month. If your goal is generating and scoring leads from video on a corporate page, stay put. That is not the job we are built for.
Stay on Frame.io
The strongest per-seat review and approval workflow in the industry, wired into Adobe's tools, at $15 per member a month on Pro and $25 on Team, with 2 TB and 3 TB included plus 2 TB per additional member. If your bottleneck is frame-accurate notes with a working editorial team, that is the right tool and the storage comes with it.
Stay on Vimeo
Genuinely the easiest place to park a large library behind one polished, well-known player, with a ladder that runs from 2 TB of storage to 10 TB and up to 200 team members. The limit is the ceiling, not the price: playback tops out at 22 Mbps at 4K and 16 Mbps for HDR or above-4K sources. If nobody in the chain asks what bitrate the client received, Vimeo is the sane answer.
And the cheapest bytes of all
What the meter buys
The file your client plays
is the file you uploaded.
The meter is not only an accounting choice, it decides what the viewer receives. Here the player streams the exact bytes that were uploaded, with no transcode anywhere, so a browser-decodable export arrives at the bitrate you exported it at. Browser playback means H.264, HEVC and AV1; 8K plays when the viewer’s own hardware decodes it. A host that counts every gigabyte on the way out has a standing reason to hold that bitrate down. A host that counts nothing on the way out does not.
The rest of what a plan changes here is short to describe. Paid plans change how many gigabytes stay online and how many team seats are included. They do not change the review path: the protected macOS route is included on every plan, the free one included. There is no per-viewer fee, no per-share fee, and no charge for a client watching a cut eleven times before approving it. If your bill surprises you, it is because you uploaded something, which is the only surprise a storage meter can produce.
That is the whole comparison. Work out how many terabytes you need online, multiply by the published rate, and check whether the host you are pricing also has a second meter running underneath it. The rate card has the plan boundaries and the block prices in one table.
Questions
Frequently asked
So how much does video hosting cost, in one sentence?
Anywhere from nothing to several hundred dollars a month, and the spread is caused by the meter rather than by quality. A free tier exists almost everywhere (5 GB here, 25 GB on Wistia, 2 GB on Frame.io). Paid plans built on storage run from $9 to $250 a month here. Plans built on seats run per person: $15 to $25 a member a month on Frame.io. Plans built on marketing features run $79 to $329 a month on Wistia. The only published Vimeo subscription price we could read on an official page is Studio at $400 a month, billed annually.
Do I pay for bandwidth on uncompressed.io?
No. The Terms state that Plans have storage, seat and caption allowances; streaming has no extra charge and that there are no bandwidth caps, and the pricing page carries uncapped views, uploads and viewers on every plan, including the free one. Your bill moves when you upload, not when your work gets watched.
Does Vimeo cut me off at 2 TB a month?
No, and the distinction matters. Vimeo publishes a monthly bandwidth threshold of 2 TB, measured as 2,000 GB, and states that it generally does not enforce the limit by stopping an account's ability to stream. Enforcement follows a pattern: exceeding 2 TB in a month at least twice in the past twelve months, or exceeding 10 TB in a month once in the past twelve. The Studio plan is metered differently again, at 36 TB of bandwidth a year with no monthly cap.
What is the cheapest way to store masters nobody will ever play?
A cloud archive bucket. Amazon publishes S3 Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099 per GB a month, which is $1 per terabyte a month, and calls it the lowest cost storage in the cloud. It is storage, not delivery: no player, no share page, no review tools, no client link, plus retrieval latency and separate retrieval and transfer charges on the way out. If a file only needs to exist somewhere safe, that is the right home for it.
Does adding a team member cost me storage here?
No. A seat is $25 a month or $300 a year, the same on every paid plan, and it carries no storage of its own. Max includes 3 seats and Studio includes 5. That is the opposite of a per-member model, where storage arrives bundled with each person you add.
What happens when I fill the storage on my plan?
You add blocks at the published rate: $40 per terabyte of hot storage a month, $20 per terabyte of cold storage a month. Cold storage is available on Max and Studio. Nothing about the bill depends on how much the library is watched.
Is the free plan real, or a trial?
It is a plan. Starter is free with 5 GB of hot storage and one film at a time, and the protected macOS review path is included on it the same as on every paid plan. What the paid plans change is storage and included team seats.
One meter, published rates
Storage, seats and caption allowances depend on your plan. Views, uploads and viewers are uncapped on every plan, including the free one. Pick the number of gigabytes you want online and you have your bill.
Sources
- 1.uncompressed.io pricing: plans, included storage, seats and storage blocks
- 2.Vimeo Help Center: Bandwidth on Vimeo (2 TB monthly threshold and how it is enforced) (help article updated 29 June 2026)
- 3.Vimeo Help Center: About the Vimeo Studio plan (10 TB storage, 36 TB yearly bandwidth with no monthly cap, $400 a month billed annually) (help article updated 10 September 2026)
- 4.Vimeo Help Center: About the Vimeo Starter plan (2 TB total file storage) (help article updated 29 May 2026)
- 5.Vimeo Help Center: About the Vimeo Standard plan (4 TB storage, 5 seats) (help article updated 29 May 2026)
- 6.Vimeo Help Center: About the Vimeo Advanced plan (7 TB storage, 10 seats) (help article updated 29 May 2026)
- 7.Vimeo Help Center: About the Vimeo Core plan (7 TB storage, 300 GB managed, 2 TB monthly bandwidth, 1 seat) (help article updated 13 August 2026)
- 8.Vimeo Help Center: Guidelines for determining playback resolution (4K maximum 22 Mbps, HDR and above-4K 16 Mbps) (help article updated 25 November 2025)
- 9.Wistia pricing: plan tiers, storage, bandwidth, users and price per additional user (fetched 11 September 2026)
- 10.Wistia support: Understanding Storage Limits (storage meter and add-on storage blocks) (article last updated 29 July 2026)
- 11.Wistia support: Account Usage and Bandwidth (what counts as bandwidth) (article last updated 15 July 2026)
- 12.Frame.io pricing: Free, Pro, Team and Enterprise per-member rates and included storage (fetched 11 September 2026)
- 13.YouTube Help: Upload videos (256 GB or 12 hours maximum, 15 minutes for unverified accounts) (fetched 11 September 2026)
- 14.Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes: Deep Archive at $0.00099 per GB-month, or $1 per TB-month (fetched 11 September 2026)