StreamYard Pricing 2026: Cost, Plans, Storage

StreamYard pricing in 2026 is two published paid plans plus two quote-only tiers: Free at $0, Core at $44.99 a month billed monthly or $35.99 billed yearly ($431.88 a year), and Advanced at $88.99 monthly or $68.99 yearly ($827.88 a year). Business and Enterprise have no published price. Streaming and recording are unlimited on paid plans; what is actually metered is storage, measured in hours of recording kept, and Core and Advanced include the same 50 hours. We read the pricing page and five help centre articles live on September 3, 2026.

StreamYard is a browser-based live streaming studio owned by Bending Spoons. You broadcast to several platforms at once, bring guests on screen, brand the output with overlays, and keep the recording afterwards. The pricing page is unusually clear about the prices and unusually quiet about the two rules that decide what you will actually pay: how storage works, and who is allowed to buy the advertised plans at all.

StreamYard pricing plans at a glance

Two lines in that table repay a second look. Storage is identical on Core and Advanced, and the paid plans are, by StreamYard's own policy, for one person. More on both below, because they are the two places where buyers get the budget wrong.

Is StreamYard's 22 percent annual discount real?

The pricing page puts a 22% Off badge above the yearly billing toggle. Divide the numbers rather than trusting the badge and it holds on one plan and not the other.

The advertised figure is the one from the expensive plan. Core lands on exactly 20.00 percent, two points short of the badge, which is about $10.79 a year. That gap is too small to change anyone's decision, and that is rather the point: it costs StreamYard almost nothing and it tells you the published numbers are worth checking yourself. This is the fifth vendor in this category where the annual discount is weakest on the cheapest plan. Riverside does a variant of the same thing, discounting at 17.2, 12.8 and 20.2 percent so that the weakest deal sits in the middle of the ladder rather than at the bottom.

What StreamYard actually meters: storage, not streaming

Paid plans include unlimited streaming, unlimited recording and unlimited local recordings. None of that is the meter. The meter is storage, measured in hours of finished recording kept on StreamYard, and the help centre gives the allowances plainly: 5 hours on Free, 50 on Core, 50 on Advanced, 50 on Teams and 700 or more on Business.

Core and Advanced include the same 50 hours. Advanced costs $68.99 a month against Core's $35.99, which is 92 percent more, and it buys zero additional space. What it does buy is 4K local recordings instead of 1080p, eight multistream destinations instead of three, an extra camera, 15 backstage participants, four hours of pre-recorded streams instead of two, on-air webinars for 100 viewers, custom fonts and downloadable transcripts. If you are hitting a storage ceiling, upgrading the plan is the wrong purchase.

The right one is the add-on, and it is much cheaper:

Two traps in that table. The first is in the help centre's own wording: the add-on replaces your allowance rather than adding to it. Buy the 100-hour option on Core and you have 100 hours, not 150. The second is the discount column. The 100 and 200-hour rungs save the identical $6.00 a year even though the larger one costs 80 percent more, so the annual discount halves as you scale up. Buying storage a year at a time is worth the least to the people buying the most of it.

Knowing what happens at the ceiling is worth more than the arithmetic. When you run out, your stream still goes out and is still recorded by whichever platform you are broadcasting to, but StreamYard stops saving it and studio recording is disabled until you delete something or buy space. The failure is silent on the live side and total on the archive side, which is the wrong way round for anyone who treats the recording as the deliverable.

The published price is not a business price

This is the single most expensive thing to miss on StreamYard's pricing page, and the company documents it in writing.

The Plan Usage Policy, updated on September 1, 2026, states that the Free, Core and Advanced plans are intended solely for personal use, or for individuals using StreamYard as part of their work, such as freelancers and their collaborators. Business-tier plans are for professional, commercial and collaborative use. The pricing page repeats the restriction in smaller type under the plan grid: Core and Advanced are for individual use only.

That clause is enforced. StreamYard's help centre documents that beginning in December 2025, qualifying accounts are transitioned to the Business Plan at their next renewal date, with email reminders 30 and 15 days beforehand, and that transitioned accounts renew at the new Business Plan price. Where do you find that price? The article says users can check it in the billing section of their account. You learn what a business pays after StreamYard has decided you are one.

The policy also publishes a threshold most vendors leave vague. A large organization is defined as a company with annual revenues of $50 million or more, and companies of that size are not eligible for the Business Plan at all: they must take Enterprise. So there are effectively three prices on this product, one of which is public.

What this means practically: if you are a solo creator, the numbers on the pricing page are your numbers. If you are a team, a company or an agency, treat them as a floor and get a quote before you plan a budget. That is the same conclusion we reached comparing StreamYard against Riverside, which gives every self-serve plan exactly one seat and sells the second editor as an add-on with no published price. Both publish a confident price ladder that stops applying the moment a second person needs access.

Is StreamYard free?

Yes, there is a genuine free plan at $0 with no time limit. It includes the core studio, six on-screen participants, one seat and five hours of storage, with two hours a month of local recording and monthly streaming limits that reset at the start of each month. The StreamYard logo is burned into every stream.

One detail is more generous than it looks: if you hit the streaming limit while you are already live, the broadcast is not cut off. The limit only applies when starting a new one. So a free plan will not humiliate you mid-show, it will simply refuse to let you start the next one until the month turns over.

Does StreamYard cost money?

Only if you need the paid features. The free tier covers going live with guests and keeping a small archive. You start paying when you want the logo gone, full HD output, multistreaming to more than one platform at once, unlimited local recordings or more than five hours of stored video. The cheapest way past all of those at once is Core at $35.99 a month on annual billing.

What is the refund policy?

StreamYard publishes a seven-day money-back guarantee that applies to your first charge only. After seven days the purchase is deemed complete and cannot be refunded. You can cancel at any time and keep paid features until the end of the current billing cycle, after which the account drops to the free plan. Paid plans include a seven-day free trial, and billing accepts USD or Indian Rupees only.

Is StreamYard worth it?

For a solo creator or freelancer running a live show, yes, and Core is the plan that makes sense. Unlimited streaming and recording for $431.88 a year is competitive against anything else that multistreams, and the studio is genuinely easy to run alone while also hosting guests, which is harder than it sounds.

For a business the answer depends on a number you cannot look up. If StreamYard classifies your account as commercial, the plan you signed up for is not the plan you renew on, and the renewal price is not published anywhere. Budget for a quote rather than for $431.88.

For anyone whose real goal is short-form video rather than live broadcasting, it is the wrong shape of tool. StreamYard's AI clips feature generates vertical 9:16 captioned shorts automatically from a recording, and it works, but it is a repurposing tool: it needs a recording to exist first. The same is true of the AI features on Descript and Riverside. If your Monday problem is six different ad hooks to test on Meta, no amount of studio quality helps, because the footage does not exist yet.

Where StreamYard fits, and where it does not

Use StreamYard when the output is a live event: a weekly show, a webinar, an all-hands, a multi-platform broadcast with guests on screen. It is a mature product at that job and priced fairly for one person. The one thing it will not do is build the content you present, so the deck for a webinar or an all-hands stays a separate job, though you can now turn a report straight into slides before you go on air rather than rebuilding it by hand.

Use something else when the output is paid social creative. AdsGen takes a product URL, picks the angle, writes the spoken hook, casts creator-style presenters and returns native 9:16 UGC video ads with captions burned in, so you can launch a real creative test without booking a studio, a guest or a recording session at all.