We’re cutting our list pricing by 17%-23% on many of our most important SKUs, including basic storage, plus encoding, and all forms of delivery. Check out Phil's product announcement post for all the juicy details.
If you’ve been following Mux and this space at all, you probably aren’t surprised. We’ve been working hard on this problem for about 18 months. After all, the second problem in video today is that video is too expensive. (The first problem in video, and the first problem we tackled at Mux, is that video is too hard. We’ve mostly solved that problem at this point.)
Back in 2023, I wrote this:
When we launched Mux Video five years ago, the difficulty of video held developers back. Now, developers are held back by cost. For many companies streaming video at scale, video is their #1 COGS line item—often bigger than their AWS or GCP bill.
Mux is going to solve this problem through a series of new features, technical innovation, and price decreases.
We’ve been working hard on that problem. Since I wrote that post, we've shipped ten major pricing improvements:
- Lower delivery pricing (February 2023)
- Free auto-generated captions (October 2023)
- Free basic encoding (October 2023)
- Starter plan ($100 of usage for $10) (February 2024)
- Cheaper storage for cold assets (July 2024)
- Free instant clipping (October 2024)
- All assets start in cold storage (March 2025)
- Lower DRM pricing (May 2025)
- 100,000 free minutes delivered per month (May 2025)
- A truly "free" plan (May 2025)
How have we made this possible? High scale and deep optimization. We push enough video volume that we can access good rates for compute, storage, and the like. We're running some of our own infrastructure (blended with public clouds and CDNs) that lowers our cost. We've gone deep into system optimization to store, process, and stream video more efficiently. And we have unique technologies (like just-in-time transcoding) that open up avenues for cost savings that most people don't have. These initiatives demonstrate our continued commitment to ensuring that powerful video capabilities are within reach for everyone, from solo developers to rapidly scaling companies.
Back in that 2023 blog post, I also wrote:
Video should be a “primitive” of the internet, like images. At its foundation, video should be a utility, like water or electricity. I turn on my faucet, and clean, safe water comes out. I turn on my video API, and video streams seamlessly at high quality.
We do this because we ❤️ video, and our mission is to democratize video infrastructure so that developers can focus on building amazing experiences with video. Affordable video is a critical part of this mission.
One other thing is on the horizon that makes affordable video even more important. As AI becomes more accessible and sophisticated, the amount of video in the world is about to explode. Just like the iPhone put a pristine camera in everyone’s pocket, AI is going to eliminate barriers to creating video, driving a new wave of video creation. And AI analysis turns catalogs of unwatched video into a useful data asset. The right pricing is needed in order to unlock these new use-cases.
I'm proud of what we've done to make video more affordable, but we aren't done. This is a permanent focus area for Mux. Every year, we're going to optimize our platform more, lower our costs, and pass the savings on to our customers.
