How the bills are built
The prices above follow five patterns. Knowing which one a quote uses tells you what to ask next.
A monthly fee plus a rate per minute
You pay to have the plan, then for every minute a session runs. The rate usually falls on higher plans.
Arcware Cloud: Lite €10 a month plus €0.15 a minute; Core €89 a month plus €0.10 a minute or less; Custom €0.08 a minute or less.
A monthly fee with minutes included
A block of minutes comes with the plan, and minutes after that are billed one by one.
Eagle 3D Streaming: Free tier with 60 lifetime minutes and a watermark; Core $29 a month with 300 minutes, then $0.10 a minute.
A rate per minute by machine, plus a fee to stay deployed
The rate depends on the GPU you choose, and there is a daily charge for keeping the application ready even when nobody is using it.
Vagon Streams: Free plan, then $0.025 to $0.047 a minute by machine, plus $0.67 a day per application. Paid plans $99.99 and $249 a month.
An annual contract
A fixed monthly fee on a yearly commitment, usually agreed with sales rather than bought online.
PureWeb Reality: Reality CORE from $750 a month on an annual plan; Extended Reality CORE $1,000 a month.
A licence to run it yourself
You pay for the software and run the GPUs in your own cloud account, so the GPU bill is separate and yours.
Scalable Pixel Streaming: Custom solutions from $100,000 for a fixed-price licence.
What to check before you sign
- What you pay when nobody is playing. Plan fees, deployment fees and reserved capacity all bill at zero usage.
- Which GPU the rate is for. Per-minute rates are quoted by machine class, and a heavier game needs a dearer one.
- How sessions start. A machine kept warm starts a session quickly and costs money while it waits. One started on demand is cheaper and slower.
- Whether you can sign up yourself. Several services publish no price and start with a sales call.
- What happens at a traffic spike. Ask how many sessions can run at once, and what a session beyond that limit sees.
Why the cost scales with players
Every one of these services runs the application on a GPU in a data centre and streams video of it. A GPU serving one session can't serve another at the same moment, so cost rises in step with hours played. That is true of the technique, whoever sells it.
The alternative: use the player's GPU
A game doesn't have to run in a data centre to run in a browser. Compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGPU, an Unreal Engine game runs on the player's own graphics card, and no cloud GPU is rented for the session. On SimplyStream that costs $0 a minute on every plan, and cloud streaming takes over only on devices that can't run the game.
How to run an Unreal Engine game in the browser explains how that works and what it needs. Comparisons sets each service beside SimplyStream.
Questions
How is application streaming priced?
Almost always by time. A GPU in a data centre runs the application for each person using it, so providers charge per minute or per hour of that GPU, often on top of a monthly plan fee. Some sell annual contracts or a licence to run the software on your own GPUs.
Why does streaming cost more as more people use it?
Each session needs its own share of a cloud GPU for as long as it lasts. Twice the players, or sessions twice as long, means twice the GPU time.
What costs are easy to miss?
Fees that apply when nobody is playing: monthly plan fees, daily charges to keep an application deployed, and capacity you reserve so sessions start quickly. Also check whether included minutes roll over and which GPU the quoted rate is for.
Is there a way to avoid the per-minute GPU cost?
Yes: run the application on the user’s own GPU. An Unreal Engine game compiled to WebAssembly and rendered with WebGPU runs in the player’s browser, and on SimplyStream that costs $0 a minute on every plan. Cloud streaming is then only needed for devices that can’t run it.