Why self-host your live streaming
Per-minute SaaS pricing, data residency and lock-in are the three reasons teams move streaming in-house. Here is what you gain — and what you take on — by running it yourself.
The case against per-minute billing
Hosted streaming platforms charge per streamed minute, per recorded minute and per GB egressed. That is fine for a demo and brutal at scale: a handful of always-on cameras or a busy events calendar turns into a five-figure monthly bill, and none of it is a fixed cost you can plan around.
Self-hosting flips the model. You pay for a server (and its bandwidth), and the marginal cost of the next stream is essentially zero. A single mid-size VM comfortably runs many concurrent rooms.
Three reasons teams move in-house
- Cost predictability. A flat server bill instead of usage-metered pricing that punishes success.
- Data residency & privacy. The media, the recordings and the metadata stay on infrastructure you own — which matters for healthcare, education, government and anything under GDPR-style rules.
- No lock-in. StreamHub is a management layer over open-source LiveKit. There is no proprietary protocol you can't leave.
What you take on
Self-hosting is not free of responsibility. You own:
- Uptime — the box, the reverse proxy, the TLS renewal (StreamHub automates the last two).
- Capacity planning — enough CPU/bandwidth for your peak concurrent viewers.
- Backups — the per-app SQLite databases and your S3 buckets.
StreamHub is designed to shrink that surface. The one-liner installer provisions the whole stack, auto-renews certificates via Caddy, ships a streamhub doctor health command, snapshots the databases before every upgrade, and exposes Prometheus metrics so you can alert before things break.
The pragmatic middle ground
You do not have to choose between "fully managed" and "reinvent everything". StreamHub gives you a managed experience — installer, CLI, dashboard, upgrades — on hardware you rent or own. You get SaaS ergonomics with self-hosted economics and control.
curl -fsSL https://www.streamhub.studio/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- \
--non-interactive --domain media.example.com --email you@example.com
That one command is the whole difference between a monthly invoice and a server you control.