IRL Bonded vs Enhanced IRL: pay by the hour or by the month
Prices for other services on this page were taken from their official websites on August 27, 2026 and copied without rounding or currency conversion. They may have changed since; check before you buy.
This comparison is not really about features, it is about billing. IRL Bonded charges for the hours you are live; we charge for the month. Which one is cheaper is arithmetic, and it depends entirely on how much you actually stream — so this page does the arithmetic rather than asserting a winner.
What IRL Bonded charges
- Relay: $0.55 per hour. Billed for the time you are live, so a quiet month costs you nothing at all.
- Cloud: $2.50 per hour. The cloud machine, again by the hour. Same logic: idle months are free, heavy months are not.
- A $15/month tier they call self-hosted. Read this one carefully before you put it in a table. It expects YOU to provide the hardware that acts as the receiver, on your own connection, in your own home or rack. It is a fee on top of a machine you own and maintain, not a managed service, so it does not belong in the same column as a monthly plan that includes the server.
The break-even, in hours per month
How many hours of their hourly pricing cost the same as one month of ours. Below the break-even, hourly is cheaper; above it, monthly is:
| Our plan | Our price | Break-even against their hourly rate |
|---|---|---|
| Stream Key Lite | €5/month | About 9 hours a month at their $0.55/h relay rate |
| Stream Key | €9/month | About 16 hours a month at $0.55/h |
| OBS Basic (720p60) | €29/month | About 11 hours a month at their $2.50/h cloud rate |
| OBS Standard (1080p30) | €59/month | About 23 hours a month at $2.50/h |
| OBS Pro (1080p60) | €89/month | About 35 hours a month at $2.50/h |
Rough on purpose: their prices are in dollars with taxes added at checkout, ours are in euros with VAT included, and we have not converted currency. Treat these as the shape of the decision, not a quote.
How to read that
If you go live a handful of evenings a month, hourly billing wins and it is not close — you would be paying us for weeks of a machine nobody is using. If you stream three times a week for three hours, that is around 36 hours a month, and every one of our tiers has already broken even.
The other half of the choice is predictability. An hourly bill rewards a quiet month and punishes a good one, and it puts a small meter in the back of your head every time you leave something running. A monthly bill is the same number whatever kind of month you have. Neither is objectively better; they suit different people.
Worth knowing on our side: a Cloud OBS can be put to sleep when you are not using it, which saves the GPU rather than your bill — the plan is still monthly. We would rather say that than let you assume sleeping is a discount. Sleeping and waking your cloud OBS.
About that self-hosted tier
It is worth separating out, because at $15 a month it looks like the cheapest managed option on this page and it is not a managed option at all. You supply the receiving hardware and the connection it sits on; you are the one who reboots it when it hangs. The honest comparison for that tier is against running the whole thing yourself on a VPS, where the software is free and the cost is your time. Running your own IRL relay on a VPS: what it really costs.
Where each one wins
Pick them if:
- You stream rarely, or in bursts. Per-hour billing is genuinely better value for a few evenings a month, and nothing we sell can compete with a bill of zero in a month you did not go live.
- You do not want a subscription at all. No monthly commitment is a real feature, especially if your streaming schedule is unpredictable.
- You already own hardware you want to put to work. Their self-hosted tier exists precisely for that, and if you have the box and the connection, it is a legitimate route.
Pick us if:
- You stream regularly. Past the break-even hours above, a flat monthly price is simply less money, and it stops going up when you have a good month.
- You want the whole OBS, not just a pipe. OBS Standard and OBS Pro give you a real OBS Studio on a GPU with a remote desktop in the browser: your scenes, your plugins, your filters.
- You want bonding on the cheapest plan. SRTLA is on every plan we sell, starting at €5/month, with no bonding upgrade to buy.
- You want to know where the servers are. We publish it: ingest in Europe, Asia and US East; Cloud OBS in Europe only.
- You work in Spanish or French. Dashboard, website and documentation are in English, Spanish and French.
Frequently asked questions
Is hourly billing cheaper than a monthly plan?
Below roughly nine hours a month for a relay, and eleven for a cloud machine, yes — comparing their published hourly rates against our entry tiers. Above that, the monthly plans cost less and stop growing. The table on this page has the break-even for every one of our plans.
What is IRL Bonded’s self-hosted plan?
A monthly fee for software and management on hardware you provide yourself. You buy or already own the receiving machine and it runs on your connection. It is not comparable to a hosted plan that includes the server, and we would not put it in the same column as one.
Can I pause my Enhanced IRL subscription between streams?
The subscription is monthly and you can cancel at any time, but there is no per-hour billing. You can put a Cloud OBS to sleep so the GPU is not burning while you are away; that is a resource saving on our side, not a discount on your invoice, and we prefer to say so.
Do both services support SRTLA bonding?
Bonded ingest is the whole point of both. On our side, SRTLA is included on every plan, from €5/month up, and a BELABOX or a phone running Moblin connects unchanged.
Which is cheaper for a full cloud OBS?
Under about eleven hours of streaming a month, their hourly cloud rate. Above it, our monthly plans — and the gap widens the more you stream. Both are far below the $129/month that the best-known managed cloud OBS charges.
Related
- IRL streaming server: what it is and which one you need
- Running your own IRL relay on a VPS: what it really costs
- Streamable vs Enhanced IRL: what we can verify
- What each plan includes, limit by limit
- Sleeping and waking your cloud OBS
Stream enough for a monthly plan to win?
Pick a plan, choose your ingest zone and be live today. Cancel whenever you like.
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