The short version. Wistia at $79 a month is the marketing video host, and most of that price is the marketing layer rather than the hosting. SproutVideo at $15 gives you 1,800 GB of bandwidth, which is more than Wistia’s $79 plan includes. Loom at $18 a seat is solving a different problem and is on this list because people keep buying it for this one. Cloudflare Stream costs $5 per 1,000 minutes stored and $1 per 1,000 delivered, and is what you want when a developer is embedding the player. Bunny Stream starts at half a cent per gigabyte delivered with free encoding, and is the cheapest way to put video on the internet.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 16 August 2026.
Putting video on your own site? Our directory keeps shortlists for marketing teams making video and reviews them on a schedule.
YouTube is free and better at delivery, so name what you are buying
YouTube will host your video for nothing, stream it more reliably than any vendor here, and play it on every device that exists. Any paid host has to justify itself against that, and three justifications hold up.
No recommendations at the end. An embedded YouTube video finishes and offers your prospect something else to watch, sometimes a competitor. On a pricing page or a product tour that is an odd thing to have paid for.
A player you control. Your colours, your call to action at the right moment, an email gate if you want one, and no branding that belongs to someone else.
Data attached to a person. YouTube tells you a video got 400 views. A marketing host tells you which lead watched 80% of the demo, and pushes that into your CRM. That single capability is what most of the money on this page actually buys.
Then there is the number that decides your bill, which is bandwidth. Compare the two ends of this list honestly: Wistia’s $79 Business plan includes 1 TB of bandwidth a month. Delivering that same terabyte on Bunny Stream costs about $5. The difference is not hosting, it is the marketing software wrapped around it, and knowing that makes the choice much easier.
1. Wistia, if the video is part of how you sell
Free with 25 GB storage and 200 GB bandwidth. Business is $79 a month, or $63.20 a month billed annually, with 250 GB or more storage and 1 TB bandwidth. Business plus Lead gen is $329 a month, or $263.20 billed annually. Enterprise is custom with 1 TB or more storage and 2 TB bandwidth. Bandwidth resets monthly and overages are charged on paid plans. Verified 16 August 2026.
Wistia has been the marketing video host for a decade and the reason is not the streaming. It is that the player is built for conversion, the analytics are per-viewer rather than per-video, and the CRM and marketing automation integrations work without a project.
If your demand generation depends on knowing that a specific named lead watched most of the demo before the sales call, this is the product, and $79 is cheap against a single deal. If it does not, you are paying about $74 a month for software you are not using.
The free tier is more generous than it looks at 25 GB storage and 200 GB bandwidth, which is enough to host a handful of pages worth of video and see whether the analytics change anything about how you sell.
Who it is wrong for: a video library nobody measures. Also anyone with real traffic and no lead generation motive, where the bandwidth allowance is the only thing you are buying and it is poor value at this price.
2. SproutVideo gives you more bandwidth for a fifth of the money
Seed is $15 a month, or $12 billed annually, with 150 GB storage and 1,800 GB bandwidth. Sprout is $45, or $35 annually, with 400 GB and 4,800 GB. Tree is $95, or $72 annually, with 1 TB and 12 TB. Forest is $295, or $195 annually, with 2 TB and 24 TB. Overages run from $0.25 per GB on Seed down to $0.06 per GB on Forest. Verified 16 August 2026.
Set the numbers side by side, because they are the argument. SproutVideo’s $15 plan includes 1,800 GB of bandwidth. Wistia’s $79 plan includes 1,000 GB. That is 80% more delivery for 19% of the price.
You give up the depth of the marketing layer, and that is a real trade rather than a free lunch. The integrations are thinner, the per-viewer analytics are less polished, and nobody’s sales team has built a workflow around it. But you get a clean branded player, privacy controls, decent analytics and no recommendations, which is the majority of what most teams wanted.
The overage rates deserve a look before you commit, since Seed’s $0.25 per GB is the most expensive on the page. A video that unexpectedly does well is a bill on this plan.
Who it is wrong for: teams whose case for paid hosting is lead capture and CRM attribution. That is where Wistia earns its price, and switching to save $64 a month is a bad trade if it breaks the reporting sales relies on.
3. Loom, which is not this and gets bought as this anyway
Starter is free with 25 videos and a 5 minute limit on screen recordings. Business is $18 a user a month. Business plus AI is $24 a user a month. Both are unlimited on videos and recording time, with up to 17% off annual billing, and the page does not state the annual per-seat figures. Enterprise is quoted. Verified 16 August 2026.
Loom is async communication, not video hosting. Record your screen, send a link, save a meeting. At that job it is excellent and it is why people already have it open when they start wondering where to put marketing video.
It ends up here because the temptation is obvious and the fit is wrong in specific ways. Per-seat pricing means cost grows with your team rather than your audience, which is backwards for public video. The player is Loom’s rather than yours. And the analytics answer who watched a message, not which lead is warm.
Buy it for support replies, onboarding walkthroughs, bug reports and the meetings you cancel. The free tier at 25 videos is genuinely useful for that, and it is the plan most individuals should be on.
Who it is wrong for: anything public facing. If the video sits on a marketing page, this is the wrong tool at the wrong price shape.
4. Cloudflare Stream, when a developer owns the embed
$5 per 1,000 minutes of video stored, and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered. Storage is prepaid in $5 increments and delivery is usage-based. Verified 16 August 2026.
Pricing by minute rather than by gigabyte is the useful thing here, because minutes are a number you can forecast. Ten hours of video stored is 600 minutes, so $3, and it is easy to calculate a year in advance without knowing anything about bitrates.
What you get is upload, transcoding, adaptive streaming, a player and signed URLs, on infrastructure that is not going to fall over. What you do not get is anything resembling marketing software, and you will be writing code to embed it.
This is the right answer when video lives inside a product, a members area or an application, and when the person responsible is an engineer rather than a marketer. It is the wrong answer if picking it means an engineer now owns your landing page videos.
Who it is wrong for: a marketing team with no developer to hand. Everything above is self-serve and this is not.
5. Bunny Stream is the cheapest, and cheap is all it promises
Storage from $0.01 per GB. Delivery from $0.005 per GB. Encoding is free, and the player and security features are included. You pay only for the traffic you use. Verified 16 August 2026.
Half a cent per gigabyte delivered is the number that reframes this whole page. A terabyte of delivery, the entire monthly allowance on Wistia’s $79 plan, costs about $5 here. Free encoding matters too, since transcoding is where several competitors quietly add cost.
It is infrastructure. There is a white-label player and it is decent, and there is nothing that will tell your sales team a lead watched the demo. The dashboard is built for people who think in gigabytes.
It ranks last for a marketing team and it would rank first for a developer optimising a bill, which is the honest way to put it. If your video is a cost centre rather than a conversion tool, start here and stop reading.
Who it is wrong for: anyone who wanted the video to do marketing work. This delivers bytes very cheaply and takes no interest in why.
Situations this list does not cover
Courses and paid content. Access control, progress and payment belong to a course platform, and hosting is one feature of it.
Live streaming and webinars. Different infrastructure, different failure modes, and a decision that should start from the live requirements.
Video inside a mobile app. The SDK and offline playback matter more than anything on this page.
Anyone with one video on a homepage. Upload it to YouTube unlisted, embed it with recommendations turned off, and spend the $79 somewhere it changes an outcome.
Also weighed
Vimeo. The obvious name in this category and a reasonable product. Its pricing page did not render for us on 16 August 2026, so we have not ranked it on figures we could not read.
YouTube unlisted embeds. Free, excellent delivery, and the branding and recommendations are the cost. For a large share of small sites this remains the correct answer.
Mux. Excellent developer video infrastructure with per-minute pricing similar in shape to Cloudflare’s. Worth pricing against both if an engineer is making the call.
Self-hosting the MP4. Cheap until someone shares it, then a bandwidth bill and no adaptive streaming for anyone on a phone. Not a saving, just a deferred problem.
Questions we get
What is the real difference between $15 and $79 a month here?
Not the hosting. SproutVideo at $15 includes 1,800 GB of bandwidth against Wistia’s 1,000 GB at $79. The extra money buys per-viewer analytics, CRM integration and lead capture. If you will not use those, it buys nothing.
Is YouTube good enough?
For most small sites, yes. The three reasons to leave are recommendations at the end of your video, branding you do not control, and the absence of viewer-level data you can act on. If none of those bother you, keep the money.
How much bandwidth do I actually need?
Rough arithmetic: a five minute 1080p video is somewhere around 150 MB delivered per full view. A thousand full views is roughly 150 GB. Most marketing sites use far less than they fear, and the free tiers here go further than people expect.
Why not just use Loom for everything?
Because it is priced per seat and public video is watched by people who are not on your team, so the cost shape is wrong. It is also a communication tool with a communication player. Use it for the job it is good at, which it is very good at.
What are the overage charges?
SproutVideo publishes them, from $0.25 per GB on Seed to $0.06 on Forest. Wistia charges overages on paid plans above the allowance. Cloudflare and Bunny have no concept of an overage because everything is usage-based. Check this before a launch, not after.
Can I move hosts later?
Yes, and it is more annoying than it sounds. Every embed on your site points at the old host, so budget for finding and replacing them all. Keep the master files somewhere you control, which makes the move an afternoon rather than a re-shoot.
See our maintained directory picks for in-house video teams, covering demo production and keeping a library accurate after the product changes.
Last reviewed: 16 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. Vimeo is unranked because its pricing page did not render for us. Loom does not publish its annual per-seat prices. Bandwidth estimates in the FAQ are our own arithmetic, not vendor figures. We review this page quarterly.
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