Huge Egress Costs for Video Streaming
prime-optimal
HOBBYOP

6 hours ago

I'm just trying to get ahead of this before I run up the bill and get surprised at the end of the month lol.

I'm running an instance of restreamer which multistreams live video streams to platforms like YT/FB/Twitch simultaneously.

Deployed without issue and got everything working as expected (I'm migrating from Oracle Cloud), but I just about fell out of my seat when I saw it's $0.05 per GB!

This 1080p gaming stream is going to 3 platforms simultaneously and this is something that Oracle, DigitalOcean and Cloudfront all handle for free or extremely low cost.

Am I missing something obvious here? Or is Railway just not the best platform for something like this?

I completely understand some people use and abuse bandwidth when it comes to video, but this is a 3-day 10 hour event and that's all that's happening this month. I was strongly considering using Railway to offer this as a service, but was honestly shocked that this type of traffic is priced this way.

Any suggestions?

Awaiting User Response

3 Replies

Railway
BOT

6 hours ago

Network egress is $0.05/GB, and that rate applies to all outbound traffic from your service to the public internet. For a 1080p stream (~6 Mbps) going to 3 platforms over 10 hours across 3 days, you'd be looking at roughly 240 GB of egress, which comes out to around $12 in network costs on top of CPU/memory for the encoding. Your Hobby plan's $5 included usage would offset part of that.

You're not missing anything - Railway prices egress per GB, which works well for most web workloads but adds up quickly for sustained high-bitrate video. If you plan to offer multistreaming as a service with regular or longer events, Railway's pricing model is likely not the best fit compared to platforms with unmetered or flat-rate bandwidth.

You can set up usage alerts, limits, and view your usage breakdown - including per service costs - by heading to railway.com/workspace/usage.


Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway about 6 hours ago


prime-optimal
HOBBYOP

5 hours ago

damn that's a bummer :{


Status changed to Awaiting Railway Response Railway about 5 hours ago


Railway
BOT

5 hours ago

Understood, and yeah, for a one-off 3-day event the egress would be around $12 on top of compute, which is manageable. For a recurring service though, the per-GB model would add up quickly compared to flat-rate bandwidth providers.


Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway about 5 hours ago


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