# 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.

- Section: Blog (https://videokr.com/blog)
- Page: https://videokr.com/blog/why-plays-not-bandwidth
- Last updated: 2026-08-18

## 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](/docs/plans-and-limits) for the exact numbers, and [how to choose a platform](/guides/best-video-hosting) for the questions to ask anyone else.

## FAQ

### Does Videokr charge for bandwidth?

No — no plan meters bandwidth. Starter and Lifetime charge only for de-duplicated plays above their allowance, while Agency has no play limit.

### How is a play counted?

One viewer starting one video, counted once per video per calendar month. Reloads and rewatches within the month are not counted again.

## Related

- [Plans, plays and limits](https://videokr.com/docs/plans-and-limits)
- [How to choose a video hosting platform](https://videokr.com/guides/best-video-hosting)
- [Hosted video platform vs self-hosting: the decision](https://videokr.com/compare/hosted-vs-self-hosted-video)
- [Videokr pricing questions answered](https://videokr.com/answers/videokr-pricing-questions)

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Videokr — Videokr is hosted video for marketing sites: upload or link a video, brand the player, capture emails inside it, embed it anywhere and read second-by-second retention. Free tier forever, $69 lifetime, or metered plans.
Plans: https://videokr.com/#pricing · Full reference: https://videokr.com/llms-full.txt