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What belongs in a fair monthly comparison?
Compare one encoder continuously sending one feed to YouTube. Include the costs that change because the encoder runs: electricity at home, or EC2 compute and applicable AWS charges. This comparison excludes video production, viewer-side YouTube delivery, internet service already paid for at home, and hardware purchases unless you choose to add them.
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The two options have different cost structures. A home PC uses electricity and may have incremental costs for always-on peripherals or maintenance. EC2 charges for the configured cloud resources and may charge for data transfer out. The result depends on your actual PC draw, local electricity tariff, selected AWS Region and instance, stream bitrate, and any applicable discounts or free-tier eligibility.
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Calculate the home PC’s electricity cost
Use the computer’s average wall draw while streaming—not its advertised power-supply capacity—and the electricity price on your bill:
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Monthly electricity cost = average draw in kW × 730 hours × local price per kWh
- Measure the PC and any peripherals that must remain on with a plug-in watt meter. If the PC would already be on for other reasons, estimate the incremental draw attributable to streaming rather than assigning all of its use to the stream.
- Convert watts to kilowatts by dividing by 1,000. For example, 100 W is 0.1 kW.
- Multiply by 730 hours for the comparison month, then by your local price per kWh.
For an illustrative U.S. scenario, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a 2025 residential average of 17.30¢ per kWh in February 2026 preliminary data. At that rate, a PC drawing 100 W continuously uses 73 kWh in 730 hours and costs about $12.63 per month in electricity. At the same rate, 50 W works out to about $6.31 and 200 W to about $25.26. These are arithmetic examples, not measurements of a particular computer or typical PC draw. The EIA’s preliminary 2025 state figures ranged from 8.20¢ per kWh in North Dakota to 35.72¢ in Hawaii, so use your own tariff and measured draw for a personal estimate.
A watt meter is useful here because it measures the wall input instead of requiring you to guess. The electricity calculation does not include hardware wear, maintenance, backup power or a computer purchase; count those only if they are incremental costs for your setup.
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Estimate the EC2 stream’s data volume
The encoder’s outgoing bitrate determines how much data EC2 sends to YouTube. A useful 30-day planning conversion is:
Approximate decimal GB per 30 days = bitrate in Mbps × 0.45
This comes from bitrate in megabits per second multiplied by the seconds in 30 days and divided by eight bits per byte. It is a planning estimate; protocol overhead and actual uptime affect realized usage.
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| Encoder bitrate | Approximate feed volume in 30 days |
|---|---|
| 10 Mbps | About 3,240 GB (3.24 TB) |
| 17 Mbps | About 5,508 GB (5.51 TB) |
YouTube’s encoder guidance gives H.264 recommendations that vary by resolution and frame rate, including 10 Mbps for 1080p30 and 17 Mbps for 1080p60. The bitrate you actually select—not simply the resolution label—drives the feed’s data volume. YouTube says it automatically transcodes an incoming live stream into formats for viewers, so for a simple EC2-encoder-to-YouTube setup, EC2’s stream traffic is the source feed, not the sum of viewers’ playback traffic.
Build an EC2 estimate without guessing
A defensible EC2 estimate needs the actual configuration and current prices. Calculate it using the AWS Pricing Calculator with these inputs:
- AWS Region and instance family and size.
- Operating system and 730 runtime hours for a 730-hour month.
- EBS storage volume and any public IPv4 address if used.
- Encoder bitrate and resulting data transfer out to the internet.
- Any discounts or free-tier eligibility that apply to your account and configuration.
AWS states that 100 GB per month of internet data transfer out is free, aggregated across AWS services and Regions, with exceptions for China and GovCloud. Confirm current terms and how they apply to your account. That allowance does not make a multi-terabyte continuous stream automatically free: for example, the planning estimate for a 10 Mbps feed is about 3,240 GB in 30 days before overhead.
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EC2 compute is billed by instance usage, and storage, IP address use and transfer may add charges depending on the selected setup and current pricing. Because the Region, instance and other required inputs are unspecified here, there is no valid universal EC2 monthly total to compare with the home-PC examples. Enter your selected configuration and check the current calculator result rather than treating an unrelated AWS live-streaming estimate as an EC2 quote.
Set the stream bitrate and encoder consistently
Use YouTube’s official encoder guidance for the resolution, frame rate and codec you plan to send. The cited H.264 recommendations include 10 Mbps for 1080p30 and 17 Mbps for 1080p60; these are recommendations for those settings, not a promise that every stream must use those bitrates.
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- Use constant bitrate (CBR) and a two-second keyframe interval; YouTube’s guidance says not to exceed four seconds.
- Use the stream key from YouTube Studio in your encoder or cloud service. Treat it like a password: anyone with access to it may be able to send a stream to your channel. Do not publish it or include it in screenshots.
- Test the selected bitrate and connection before relying on a continuous broadcast. A stream that drops or runs below the chosen bitrate changes actual uptime and data use.
For an EC2 encoder, the EC2-to-YouTube feed is the transfer to cost. YouTube’s own transcoding for viewers is not AWS viewer delivery. AWS MediaLive, MediaPackage and CloudFront represent a separate managed encoding and distribution architecture; pricing for that architecture should not be presented as the cost of one EC2 instance sending a feed to YouTube.
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Which option is cheaper in practice?
Put the home electricity estimate beside the complete current EC2 estimate for the same bitrate and uptime. The home figure is often straightforward once measured; the EC2 figure is not meaningful until you specify Region, instance, OS, storage, data transfer and account terms. Neither option has an inherent price advantage in every case.
| Cost or trade-off | Home PC | AWS EC2 encoder |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring base cost | Measured incremental power draw × local kWh price; optionally add incremental maintenance or backup power. | Selected instance price × runtime, plus applicable storage and other resource charges. |
| Stream feed data | Uses the home internet connection; any incremental ISP cost depends on the home plan. | Continuous feed volume may incur data-transfer-out charges beyond applicable allowances. |
| Required cost inputs | Measured wall draw, runtime and local electricity tariff. | Region, instance, OS, storage, IP use, runtime, bitrate, egress and account discounts or eligibility. |
| Operational considerations | The computer and necessary home connection must remain available; outages or restarts can interrupt encoding. | Cloud-hosted compute avoids depending on a home PC, but instance configuration and stream recovery still need consideration. |
Existing equipment and usage change the break-even point. If a home computer is already running, its incremental streaming draw may be much lower than its total draw. Conversely, an EC2 instance sized for the encoder, high egress volume, or an expensive Region can change the cloud total. Compare real inputs rather than assuming a fixed number for either side.
Keep YouTube rights and channel eligibility in view
A 24/7 broadcast does not grant permission to use the material in it. Use video and audio you own or have permission to stream, and review YouTube’s copyright requirements before scheduling a continuous loop. Repeatedly replaying material also does not itself establish that a channel meets YouTube’s monetization or reused-content requirements. Copyright permission, live-stream eligibility and monetization review are separate questions; do not assume one guarantees another.
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Or let it run in the cloud
If your goal is to keep uploaded videos looping on YouTube without leaving an encoder PC on, StreamNeo is a cloud option: upload a recording or build a playlist, add your YouTube stream key once, and go live. It streams to YouTube, not to other platforms.
- Nothing has to stay powered on at home for the stream to continue.
- Any uploaded quality up to 4K 60fps streams as made, at one flat price per slot with no re-encode or quality tiers.
- Automatic recovery is included if YouTube drops the stream.
- Each slot includes one always-on stream, 10 GB storage per slot pooled across active slots, looping and playlists, and StreamNeo team support.
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Monthly pricing: $9.99 per month. See StreamNeo or current plan details, then start the free first day.
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