Live Stream Archive Cost Calculator

Before you commit a growing replay library to any host, it helps to see the number. This live stream archive cost calculator gives you a transparent, deterministic estimate for storing and delivering your own recordings on files.link — no login, no sales call, no per-minute VOD meter. You enter five things: how many hours of finished footage you keep, the average bitrate (which sets how many gigabytes each hour becomes), your retention period, your expected monthly replay views, and how much of a typical replay a viewer actually watches.

The calculator turns those into estimated storage gigabytes, monthly CDN delivery, and a prepaid-credit cost — using the same per-GB storage and CDN rates the rest of the site quotes.

The math is simple and honest on purpose. A stream at 8 Mbps is roughly 3.6 GB per hour, so 100 hours of 1080p archive is about 360 GB at rest; storage is billed per gigabyte per month, and delivery is billed per gigabyte streamed from the CDN edge. There is no charge for minutes stored or minutes watched — the exact per-minute metering that makes a deep livestream archive expensive on Mux-style platforms.

That difference is the whole point of running a stream archive cost calculation: a write-once, read-rarely back catalog should cost almost nothing to keep, and this page shows you why.

files.link is the storage and delivery layer for recordings you already own. It stores the finished VOD you export from Twitch, YouTube Live, OBS-to-RTMP, or a managed ingest service and serves it from a global CDN on a permanent URL. For the full workflow and the honest scope of the product, see live stream archive storage; for the general at-rest framing, VOD archive storage covers the same job and the same VOD archive storage pricing model, while stream archive hosting frames it as hosting completed broadcasts.

To shrink the storage line on recordings nobody watches anymore, move them to the cold storage tier (note its minimum retention) and rerun the estimate.

A word on scope and honesty. files.link is neutral storage infrastructure for recordings you own or are authorized to keep — your own broadcasts, your team's events, webinars and talks you hold the rights to. It is not the old StreamArchive-style scraper that grabbed other broadcasters' deleted VODs without consent, it has no connection to any third-party streamarchive or CastCache service, and it never pulls streams from any platform on your behalf.

The calculator estimates the cost of storing an authorized livestream archive you export yourself; it does not download, record, or archive anyone else's stream.