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Tool · CDN cost model

CDN Cost Savings Calculator

Built by Raul Vecchione

This tool estimates monthly CDN egress costs before and after optimizing your bitrate ladder. Adjust subscribers, viewing hours, profile mix, and choose an optimization scenario to see potential savings.

Every payoff estimate worth trusting has this shape: your own numbers in, a monthly figure out, every assumption visible. Put each AI option through the same arithmetic and the ranking writes itself.

Monthly CDN egress

Baseline cost
$38.0MUSD per month
Optimized cost
$28.1MUSD per month
Monthly savings
$9.9MUSD per month

Illustrative. The scenario percentages are typical ranges, not a quote — actual savings depend on codec choice, content complexity, ABR ladder design and your CDN contract.

Monthly savings $9.9M

1.Usage & Cost Inputs

Popular streaming services:

2.Choose Optimization Scenario

Scenarios explained:

  • Video Codec Update: Modern codecs + per-title tuning yield top-tier savings (4K –30%, 1080p –25%, 720p –20%, 480p –15%)
  • Per-Title Encoding: Content-aware bitrate ladders (e.g. Bitmovin, AWS Elemental) → strong savings (4K –20%, 1080p –18%, 720p –15%, 480p –10%)
  • Efficient Transcoding: Multi-pass encoding & pre-processing → modest gains (4K –10%, 1080p –8%, 720p –5%, 480p –3%)

Note: Simplified example. Actual savings depend on codec choice, content complexity, ABR ladder design, and tuning parameters.

3.ABR Ladder & Profile Mix

Usage across the four profiles must total 100%. Each profile's bitrate change is applied to its baseline bitrate.

4K
1080p
720p
480p