How much it costs to build your own video site
Hosting is cheaper than most people expect at the start. The bill that grows is streaming, and it grows with your audience.
By The Generated Worlds editors · Published
If you build your own video site, hosting can be surprisingly inexpensive at the beginning. For a small AI-drama studio, expect roughly $20–$60 per month: $10–$20 a year for a domain, $0–$20 a month for website hosting, $0–$25 a month for a database and accounts, plus usage-based video storage and streaming. Keeping videos online is cheap; the bigger expense comes when people watch.
This page is about running costs for a site you build and own. It excludes the one-time cost of designing and building it.
Typical costs
| Component | Estimated cost |
|---|---|
| Domain | $10–$20/year |
| Website hosting | $0–$20/month |
| Database/accounts | $0–$25/month |
| Video storage and streaming | Usage-based |
| Estimated starting total | $20–$60/month |
How video is priced
Video is billed by the minute, in two parts: the minutes you keep online, and the minutes people watch. As an example of typical pricing:
- Store 1,000 minutes of video: $5/month
- Deliver 1,000 watched minutes: $1
- Encoding and bandwidth are included
So if you have 50 hours of finished dramas, storage is only about $15 a month. The bigger expense comes when people watch, not from keeping the videos online.
What it costs as your audience grows
So your approximate monthly cost might be:
| Audience usage | Video cost | Total site cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 viewers × 10 minutes | $10 | $30–$60 |
| 10,000 viewers × 20 minutes | $200 | $220–$260 |
| 50,000 viewers × 30 minutes | $1,500 | $1,550–$1,600 |
The pattern matters more than the exact figures: the part of the bill that scales is the watching. A series that finds an audience raises your costs on the same day it raises your revenue, which is why what you charge and what you pay are worth planning together.
What the budget above leaves out
- Designing and building the site itself, which is a one-time cost, and the time to keep it running afterwards.
- Taking money: a payment provider takes a percentage and a fixed fee per charge, and somebody has to build the checkout, the accounts and the rules about what each viewer may watch.
- The work around the video: encoding settings, subtitles, thumbnails and keeping links alive.
Or skip the build
A Generated Worlds studio site includes the pages, hosting, streaming, viewer accounts and per-episode payments, so none of the lines above are yours to run. Publishing episodes and earning from them are free and you keep 80% of net revenue; the site is free to build, $1 for its first month live, then from $39 a month, with an allowance of minutes watched on the site included in each plan.
Common questions
How much does it cost to run your own video site?
Roughly $20–$60 a month at the start: $10–$20 a year for a domain, $0–$20 a month for website hosting, $0–$25 a month for a database and accounts, plus usage-based video storage and streaming.
What is the most expensive part?
Streaming. Storing 50 hours of finished dramas is about $15 a month, but every minute watched is billed: 50,000 viewers watching 30 minutes each is about $1,500 a month in video cost alone.
Does that include building the site?
No. These are running costs only. Designing and building the site is a separate one-time cost, as is the work of keeping it running.
Is it cheaper to use a platform?
At a small audience the difference is small either way. What a platform changes is what you have to run: on a Generated Worlds studio site, hosting, streaming, viewer accounts and payments are included, the site is $1 for its first month live and from $39 a month after, and publishing and earning are free with 80% of net revenue to you.
Keep reading
Publish here
Opening a studio takes a minute and costs nothing. You set the channel name and artwork straight away; a person approves the channel before your first series goes live, and you keep 80% of net revenue from viewer unlocks.
Want the terms in full first? How publishing on Generated Worlds works