Infrastructure & Costs

WebRTC gets genuinely expensive in one narrow place: large one-to-many broadcast, where every viewer needs its own relayed stream, the SFU — the server that forwards media to each participant — has to be provisioned for peak concurrency, and cascading between regions bills the same bytes more than once. Below roughly 1,000 concurrent viewers per […]

Running a live-commerce video platform in production means paying to deliver one seller’s broadcast to every viewer watching it — not paying for a symmetric video call. That single fact shapes the whole cost model: the dominant line is delivery (bandwidth to the audience), and the biggest lever in the entire bill is how you deliver. Over […]

The COVID-19 pandemic drove unprecedented growth in video conferencing across 2020 and 2021. On Google’s Q1 2020 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was adding roughly 3 million new Meet users a day, had seen usage grow about thirty-fold since January, and had passed 100 million daily meeting participants. A Google engineering blog […]

The porn industry is a huge one, but how big it actually is? Let’s find out taking a look at Pornhub’s metrics

Zoom got to the top of the video-chat niche during the pandemic. Let’s find out how much they spend.

The well-known and popular platform takes a ton of resources and efforts to maintain. We calculated how much they spend.

Running live-streaming infrastructure at Twitch’s scale costs an estimated $3–4 million per month (2026). At roughly 2.1 million average concurrent viewers and ~1.5 billion hours watched per month, data delivery (CDN/egress) is the dominant line at ~$1.5–2M/month, and server compute — driven mostly by live video transcoding — adds ~$1–1.5M/month. At this scale, bandwidth, not […]

Last year saw the release of the highly popular trivia game: HQ Trivia. In fact, it now attracts over 1 million players per game. The company behind that game has recently raised $15 million in new funding raising their value to $100MM. What a great success! The Internet has flooded with questions: What is the secret behind […]