Mux pricing in 2026: what the three meters actually cost

Mux publishes a clean pricing page: three per-minute rates, a calculator, and encoding at $0. Then the first invoice shows up and it's almost entirely storage and delivery, on a handful of files you uploaded once. (This is about Mux the company, not muxing as in combining audio and video streams.)

Quick answer: Mux pricing is three meters, all billed in minutes of video: input, storage, and delivery. Input is $0 at Basic quality at every resolution, including 1080p, 2K and 4K. Basic storage starts at $0.0024 per minute per month at 720p, with resolution multipliers on top, and the first 100,000 delivered minutes each month are free before delivery bills from $0.0008 per minute. Fair pricing if you need a player, an HLS ladder and a CDN. If you only need one file transformed and handed back, every line on the invoice is custody of an asset you already hold, and a per-job processor like FFmpeg Micro bills the seconds of work instead of the month.

The three meters behind every Mux invoice

Mux Video's bill is input, storage and delivery, and Mux's own pricing docs price all three in minutes of video rather than gigabytes. Quality level (Basic, Plus, Premium) and resolution set the rate on each one.

The headline reads cheap because of the first row. Encoding costs nothing at Basic, so the meter everyone shops on is the one set to zero. Mux cut prices about 20% on average on July 17, 2025: encoding down roughly 22% on Plus and Premium, Basic storage about 23%, delivery about 17%, and the 100,000 free delivery minutes extended to every resolution and quality level. Those rates are still live, which is why a page dated 2025 and one dated 2026 can both be right.

Is Mux encoding free, or only at Basic quality?

Mux input is $0 at Basic quality, at 720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K alike. Plus starts at $0.025 per minute at 720p and Premium at $0.0375, both scaling with the multipliers below. So "free encoding" is true and incomplete: a thousand minutes of 1080p Plus input is $25 at the base rate times 1.25x, roughly $31, before you've stored or delivered anything.

Storage is prorated, and it still has a minimum

Mux prorates storage by the percentage of the month an asset is stored, so a 10-minute video held for half a month bills as 5 minutes. Basic quality assets carry a one-month minimum storage charge, prorated after that. Plus assets have no minimum.

Upload a Basic asset, pull your file, delete the asset an hour later, and you're billed a full month. A pipeline that touches 500 one-minute 1080p files a month and deletes each the same day still pays 500 minutes at $0.0024 times the 1.25x multiplier, about $1.50, for files that existed for an afternoon.

The multipliers compound on everything resolution-sensitive:

A 4K asset stores at $0.0096 per minute per month against $0.0024 for the same clip at 720p, a good argument for converting 4K AI output down to 1080x1920 first rather than warehousing the master.

Automatic Cold Storage is on by default for self-service accounts. An asset nobody views for 30 days moves to Infrequent at a 40% discount, 90 days to Cold at 60%, and new eligible assets start cold until their first play. Real saving, and a quiet admission that a file nobody plays is a rental Mux priced down rather than out.

What Mux costs per minute delivered

Delivery is the meter that actually produces a large Mux bill, and it's free until it isn't. The first 100,000 minutes delivered each month cost nothing regardless of quality or resolution. After that, Basic and Plus delivery is $0.0008 per minute up to 720p and $0.001 per minute at 1080p for the first 500,000 minutes.

Work a real streaming invoice. A catalogue of 200 hours at 1080p is 12,000 stored minutes, so storage is 12,000 × $0.003 = $36 a month. Viewers watching 500,000 minutes bill 400,000 after the free 100,000, at $0.001 each, so $400. Input at Basic is $0. Total around $436 a month for ingest, an adaptive ladder, hosting, a player and CDN delivery to real viewers. Priced fairly. If that's your product, stop reading here and go use Mux.

Getting an MP4 back out: static renditions

If you want a file out of Mux rather than a stream, static renditions are the path, priced in two parts. Standard static rendition MP4s are free to generate. Advanced static renditions bill per minute per rendition by resolution, from $0.008 per minute up to 720p on Basic and Plus for the first 5,000 minutes, up to $0.032 per minute at 4K, plus MP4 storage at $0.00075 per minute at 720p and $0.001 at 1080p.

Downloading that MP4 also draws on delivery minutes. One download of a one-minute file is one delivered minute, noise against 100,000 free. Pull a thousand files a day for a model-prep pipeline and the noise becomes the bill.

The $0.0075 per minute encoding figure is dead

You'll still find $0.0075 per minute quoted as Mux's encoding rate, usually next to a per-gigabyte delivery model at around $0.15 per GB. Both are stale: Mux's current docs price Basic input at $0 and meter delivery in minutes, so any page quoting dollars per GB for Mux delivery describes a model Mux no longer sells.

The figure survives because procurement marketplaces and comparison blogs copy each other's tables. Vendr's Mux page still carries the $0.0075 rate and the per-GB delivery numbers, and encoder-comparison posts reproduce it from there. The same happens to us in reverse: at least four third-party pages list FFmpeg Micro at "$19 for 2,000 minutes" with a one-minute minimum, which inverts how our billing works. Read rates off the vendor's own pricing page, including ours.

What the Free, Launch and Scale plans buy

Mux's plans are billing wrappers around the same usage meter, not feature tiers. The free plan stores up to 10 on-demand video assets, includes 100,000 free delivery minutes and 100,000 free Robots units a month, is on-demand only, and needs no credit card. Launch is $20 a month and buys $100 of usage credit. Scale is $500 a month for $1,000 of credit. Pay as you go and Enterprise sit above them.

That 10-asset cap is the real gate for a processing pipeline. Any workflow holding more than ten videos at once has left the free plan, so the practical floor is $20 a month for a workload that might meter $2 of usage. Third-party summaries claim unused Launch and Scale credit expires each month; I could not find that in Mux's own documentation, so verify it before you plan around it.

Mux shipped spending alerts on October 14, 2026, up to three dollar thresholds per organization checked about once an hour, which concedes that customers can't predict their own bill.

The fork: is your unit a month or a job?

Mux prices custody of a library over time. If your video lives on your product, gets watched, and needs an ABR ladder and a CDN in front of it, that's the right unit and the arithmetic above works in your favor. If your video is an input to something else, the unit is wrong in a way no discount fixes.

Look at the second invoice. Three hundred one-minute 1080p clips a month, each resized, watermarked, downloaded once and deleted. Input: $0. Delivery: 300 minutes, free. Storage: 300 minutes at $0.003 with the one-month Basic minimum, about $0.90, plus MP4 rendition storage. Under $2 of metered usage inside a $20 plan, because 300 assets won't fit in ten slots. You're paying to host a file you already have in your own bucket, and it repeats next month whether or not you process anything.

Metered on input duration instead, those same 300 minutes are 1,800 tokens on FFmpeg Micro, inside the 2,500 tokens Starter includes for $19.99 a month. Similar money, different unit: one bills a month of custody, the other bills the seconds of work and goes quiet when you stop submitting jobs. Same move as pricing GPU video prep per video instead of per hour, and it's why the encoding step is worth separating from hosting.

Pitfalls when you estimate a Mux bill

Most Mux estimates miss low because they model the meter that's free and skip the two that aren't. The ones that bite:

A per-job meter, in numbers

FFmpeg Micro's rates come off our live pricing page as of October 29, 2026. A new account gets 200 tokens at sign-up, about 33 minutes of video, with no card. Starter is $19.99 a month for 2,500 tokens, Pro is $49.99 for 7,000.

One token buys 10 seconds of input video, metered per second with no rounding up to the minute. Trim 30 seconds out of a one-hour recording and you're billed 30 seconds. Failed jobs are never billed, and status checks, job listings and downloads cost nothing. Top-ups work on any plan, including Free: 500 tokens for $5, 1,200 for $10, 3,000 for $25, and purchased tokens don't expire while your account is open. No storage meter, no delivery meter, no monthly minimum, because there's nothing to keep custody of once you've pulled your file.

FAQ

Is Mux encoding really free in 2026?

Mux input is $0 at Basic quality, at every resolution including 1080p, 2K and 4K. Plus input starts at $0.025 per minute at 720p and Premium at $0.0375, so free encoding covers one of three quality levels.

What does Mux cost per minute?

Mux bills three per-minute rates, not one. At 720p Basic, input is $0, storage is $0.0024 per minute per month, and delivery is $0.0008 per minute after the first 100,000 delivered minutes, with 1.25x, 2x and 4x multipliers at 1080p, 2K and 4K.

Why is my Mux invoice mostly storage when nobody watched the videos?

Mux storage bills every minute of video you keep, every month, and Basic assets carry a one-month minimum even if you delete them the same day. An unwatched library still accrues storage, which is why Automatic Cold Storage discounts unviewed assets 40% after 30 days and 60% after 90.

Is Mux the wrong tool if I only need a resize, a watermark or burned-in captions?

Mux is built around hosting and delivering video, so a job that transforms one file and hands it back still pays storage and delivery for an asset you already own. A per-job processing API bills the input duration once and keeps no copy.

Our pricing comparison puts both models side by side with the arithmetic done: a per-second job meter against platform pricing for the same workload.