Honest answers on total cost
The honest answers to the six pushbacks we hear most.
Total cost of ownership
Six pushbacks, answered directly
You still pay in two places. Isn't that more expensive when you add it up?
You're right, you do pay in two places. That's exactly why we always quote the combined total. For the verified R2 stack above, that's Nulx $91 plus R2 storage and transfer of about $25 — roughly $116 combined. The same usage on a fully managed platform like Cloudflare Stream runs about $630. Add the two bills together and it's still far cheaper. For now, place the two invoices side by side — a monthly consolidated report is planned.
I use S3, though. Isn't that a transfer-fee bomb?
That's a fair call-out. At this usage, an AWS S3 plus generic CDN stack racks up about $1,080 in transfer costs alone, and our calculator will warn you about exactly that. You have two real options: move to R2 or Bunny (first 100 videos migrated free, with a checksum-verification report), or stay on a managed platform — which can genuinely be the better call at small scale.
I heard renditions push storage costs to more than double. Is that true?
Yes, about 2.2x the source. A smart encoding ladder generates multiple resolutions. Every service produces renditions regardless of provider — the difference is whether you can see them. Nulx shows the source-plus-rendition storage total right in the calculator and on your bill. Managed platforms just fold that same storage into a flat fee where you can't see it.
What if cloud prices go up?
We can't stop that — neither we nor a managed platform sets cloud wholesale prices. What you keep is the ability to switch wholesalers. Because Nulx encodes to standard HLS, you can move to R2 or Bunny with no re-encoding and a $0 switching cost. If you're locked into a managed platform, a price hike is something you just have to absorb.
Doesn't this mean more for me to manage?
Initial setup takes about 3 extra minutes. A wizard generates the exact-permission IAM JSON for you and walks you through connecting the bucket. What you get for those 3 minutes is ownership — your source files always live in your own account, and you're never locked back into a vendor.
Bunny Stream is just cheaper, though.
That can genuinely be true depending on usage. At very small scale, a fully managed service can come out cheaper — our calculator will say so, and in that case we'll hand you the Bunny link ourselves. Where it flips: subtitles and translation (about a third of managed pricing), as volume grows, and whenever ownership matters to you.