Financial cost of video transcoding

Whether you're transcoding a given video using a serverless code function, or a dedicated transcoding service, you need to consider that it is almost invariably an expensive thing to do (in the context of a website).

Costs of using a serverless code function

If you're using a serverless code function to transcode videos, the chances are it will be for 480p or 720p versions of fairly short videos (anything else will be beyond what your serverless code function is capable of handling).

This option is undoubtedly cheaper by a considerable margin, but it is still very expensive when compared to e.g. image transcoding, due to the larger amount of processing time involved. Below are some reference figures I averaged from some testing, as an example of the order of magnitude of difference involved.

File details	Resize to	Transcoding method	Codec	Time to transcode	Cost
Image (4000x2500 PNG, 10MB)	640x480	Lambda, 10240MB memory	JPEG	2000ms	~$0.00034
Video (1920x1080 MPEG-4, x264 encoded, 50 seconds long)	640x480	Lambda, 10240MB memory	x265/HEVC	82000ms	~$0.014
Video (1920x1080 MPEG-4, x264 encoded, 50 seconds long)	640x480	Dedicated transcoding service	x265/HEVC	24000ms	~$0.028
Video (1920x1080 MPEG-4, x264 encoded, 50 seconds long)	1280x720	Dedicated transcoding service	x265/HEVC	29000ms	~$0.056