Reelm vs Mux: the real cost of bandwidth
Mux is one of the best developer video platforms around. Great docs, a clean API, and the deepest video analytics on the market. None of that is in question here. The question is what happens to your bill as your audience grows.
Where the money goes
Mux meters minutes delivered, priced by resolution, on top of storage and encoding. The first 100,000 minutes delivered each month are free, which is genuinely generous at low volume. Past that, every minute watched adds to the bill. So the better your videos do, the more delivery you pay for.
Reelm meters storage and delivers streaming at $0. Same upload, same adaptive HLS, same signed playback, but the part that scales with success is removed. Plug your storage and views into the cost calculator and the crossover is usually obvious fast.
An honest example
Take 100 hours of 1080p stored and 250,000 views a month at 8 minutes each. That is about 225 GB stored and 73 TB streamed. On Mux that delivery is the dominant cost; on Reelm the streaming is free and you are on a flat storage tier. The same workload that costs hundreds or thousands in delivery elsewhere is a flat monthly number here.
When to pick which
Choose Mux if you need its industry-leading video data, or mature live streaming at scale today. Choose Reelm if your videos get watched a lot and you want a flat, predictable bill that does not move when a video takes off. The full breakdown is on the Mux alternative page.