When Alexander Voz evaluated video infrastructure options for Wild Earth, he was looking at significant growth. Wild Earth streams live wildlife content to a global audience, and their viewership was expanding rapidly. They'd recently increased daily live streaming hours by 30%, and Alexander needed to understand what that growth would cost.
"The challenge wasn't just finding infrastructure that could handle our scale," Alexander explained. "It was understanding how costs would behave as we grew."
This is the fundamental question for any company building with video: how do infrastructure costs scale as your product succeeds?
The forecasting problem
For Caast TV, a live shopping platform working with major European brands like Orange, Decathlon, and Kiabi, the challenge was different. CEO Antoine Leclercq wasn't worried about unexpected cost spikes — he needed to forecast with confidence. When you're signing new enterprise clients, you need to know exactly what your video infrastructure will cost six months from now.
"Predictable video costs are essential," Antoine noted.
Both companies faced the same underlying issue: understanding how video costs behave at their level of usage.
The Scale plan
We built the Scale plan to solve this: $500 per month gets you $1,000 in Mux usage credits. No annual commitment. Opt out anytime.
Mux pricing already decreases as you use more, but the Scale plan accelerates that curve. You get the economic benefits of high-volume usage immediately, without needing to commit to annual contracts or negotiate custom pricing.
For Wild Earth, the impact was immediate. "When Mux reached out to us and offered to try the Scale plan, I was pleasantly surprised to see our costs drop by nearly 50%, despite recently increasing our daily live streaming hours by 30%," Alexander said. "This just confirmed for me that Mux is a reliable long-term partner for all our live and on-demand streaming needs."
For Caast TV, the Scale plan addressed Antoine's core need. "Mux's plan makes forecasting simple and strengthens our confidence in their long-term infrastructure approach."
Understanding your costs
Mux charges based on three metrics, all measured in minutes of video:
- How much you ingest (encoding)
- How much you store
- How much you deliver to viewers
Each decreases as your volume increases. Here's what this looks like for a real application.
Example: a social video app
Say you're launching a social app for sharing short-form video. You're estimating:
- 45,000 monthly active users
- Each user uploads 5 videos per month (30 seconds each)
- Each user watches 200 videos per month
- Videos are watched in an infinite-scroll feed, consuming about 25% of each asset
- You're keeping 3 months of content, with 80% in cold storage (average based on other similar Mux customers)
This translates to:
- 100,000 monthly encoding minutes
- 300,000 storage minutes
- 1,000,000 minutes delivered
For this use case, we’d recommend 720p at basic quality.
SKU | Volume | Unit Rate | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
Input | 100,000 Basic 720p Input minutes | 100k @ $0.00 per min | $0 |
Storage | 30,000 Basic Storage minutes | 30k @ $0.0024 per min = $72 | $374.40 |
Delivery | 1,000,000 720p Delivery minutes | First 100k @ $0.00 per min = $0 | $700 |
TOTAL | $574.40 per month |
With the Scale plan, you're running a UGC application with 45k MAU for $574 per month.
That includes encoding, adaptive bitrate delivery, auto-generated captions in 22 languages, our image API, webhooks, MCP server and everything else Mux provides.
For those switching to Mux
At Mux, we price in minutes of video. If you're currently using another provider, you might be pricing video differently. Many platforms charge for bandwidth in gigabytes rather than minutes.
Let's work through a realistic example of comparing Mux to your current provider. For simplicity, this comparison focuses on delivery costs, the largest component for most streaming. applications.
The Scale plan gives you $1,000 in credits for $500/month. At our pricing, that's roughly 1.1 million minutes of 1080p video delivery per month (after the first 100k free minutes).
If you're streaming 1080p video at a typical bitrate of 5.33 Mbps, 1.1 million minutes translates to about 44TB of monthly bandwidth. So if you're currently delivering around that volume, here's what you might be paying today:
Vendor | Source | Streaming Volume | 1080p Unit Cost | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Typical CDN Rates | Cloudfront's public pricing | 44TB | ≈$0.08 per GB | $3,405 |
Legacy Video Platform | Vimeo’s public pricing | 44TB | ≈$0.0625 per GB | $2,750 |
Mux Scale Plan | Mux pricing | 1,100,000 1080p streaming mins | First 100k mins Free | $500 |
Converting from GB to minutes
If you need to convert your current bandwidth usage to streaming minutes, use our calculator. Or as a quick hack, you can easily just ask your favourite LLM the following:
“How many minutes of video is 44TB at 5.33 mbps average bitrate”?
What happens as you grow
Our pricing continues to decrease as your usage increases. If you exceed $1,000 in monthly usage credits, you're charged for additional usage at our standard rates, which continue to get more cost-effective at higher volumes.
You can see exactly how this works in our pricing guide. There's no penalty for growth, no surprise pricing tiers.
Getting started
If you're already a Mux customer, you can opt into the Scale plan through your dashboard in the Billing section.
If you're evaluating Mux and want help calculating what your specific usage would cost, reach out. I'm happy to walk through the numbers with you, greg@mux.com.
The goal with the Scale plan is straightforward: make video infrastructure affordable as you scale, without the complexity of annual commitments. For Wild Earth and Caast TV, that was what they needed to make Mux their long-term infrastructure partner.
