Why we meter plays, not bandwidth

Bandwidth billing means a customer cannot know what a video will cost until after it succeeds, and a page that goes viral produces an invoice instead of a celebration. Videokr meters plays instead — de-duplicated once per video per month — so the cost of publishing is knowable in advance, and bandwidth is never billed on any plan.

Updated 2026-08-18 · Markdown version

What bandwidth pricing asks of you

To predict your bill on a per-gigabyte plan you need: the file's bitrate, the average share of the video watched, the mix of renditions served, and how many people will watch — before publishing. Nobody has those four numbers in advance. So the honest description of egress pricing is: an unknown multiplied by your success.

It also creates a perverse incentive. The better your video does, the more it costs, so a marketing team learns to keep videos short and low quality for reasons that have nothing to do with the audience.

What per-play pricing asks

One number: how many people will start the video. Marketers estimate that every day, because it is the same estimate as page views.

The de-duplication rule matters more than the price

A "play" only means something if the definition is tight. Ours: one viewer starting one video, counted once per video per calendar month. Consequences:

• Your own testing does not eat the allowance.
• A visitor who reloads five times is one play.
• A viewer who returns weekly for a month is one play.
• Impressions — the player loading, nobody pressing play — are reported and never billed.

Watch for the opposite pattern when comparing vendors: a "view" defined as three seconds of playback, counted every time, on a page with autoplay, inflates a number you are billed on.

The arithmetic

At $1 per 10,000 extra plays, a page that unexpectedly does ten times its usual traffic — 100,000 plays in a month instead of 10,000 — costs $9 more. On an egress plan, 100,000 plays of a 50 MB video is measured in terabytes, and the invoice is a conversation with your finance team.

What we give up

Being fair about it: per-play pricing subsidises long, high-bitrate video and slightly penalises very short clips. A customer with one 20-second loop watched 10,000 times pays the same as one with a ten-minute lesson watched 10,000 times, although the second costs us far more to deliver. We accept that because predictability is worth more to a customer than perfect cost attribution.

See plans and limits for the exact numbers, and how to choose a platform for the questions to ask anyone else.