Why egress fees punish you for going viral
Egress is the data sent out to viewers every time someone watches your video. It is the single line item that surprises people most on a video bill, because it does not depend on how much you store or upload. It depends on how much your audience watches. The more successful your video, the bigger the number.
Why it feels backwards
Imagine a clip takes off. Tens of thousands of people watch it. That is the best day your content has had, and it is also the day your invoice spikes. On a delivery-metered platform, popularity and cost move together. You get punished for the exact thing you were trying to achieve.
One hour of 1080p video to a thousand viewers moves roughly 2.7 TB. At typical egress rates that is real money, and it climbs from there with every extra viewer.
What the platforms actually charge
Mux meters minutes delivered. Cloudflare Stream charges per minute delivered. Bunny charges per gigabyte delivered, and self-hosting on AWS CloudFront charges about $0.085 per gigabyte of egress. The units differ, but the shape is the same: a meter that ticks up with viewership. You can see the gap for your own numbers in the cost calculator.
The fix: meter storage, not delivery
Reelm bills for the gigabytes you store and makes streaming free. Your bill is tied to a number you control, your library size, instead of a number you cannot, your viewership. A video can get 10 views or 10 million and the invoice does not move.
We can do this because we deliver from object storage with $0 egress and gate playback with a short-lived signed token. No egress cost to pass on means no egress line on your bill. If you are evaluating options, compare the Mux alternative, the Cloudflare Stream alternative, and the Bunny Stream alternative.