Short answer: your storage total is built from the files we generate, not the file you handed us — and the length and resolution of a video matter far more than the size of your source file.
What actually counts toward storage
When a video arrives — by upload, by a source link like Dropbox or S3, or by auto-conversion — we process it once and keep the delivery-ready output: optimized MP4 renditions at several resolutions and bitrates, the HLS and MPEG-DASH streaming segments that go with them, and a poster thumbnail. That set is what lives on our network and what your storage total measures.
Your original file is not part of that total. We don’t keep a byte-for-byte copy of it, so it costs you nothing — and it’s also why you should keep your masters somewhere you control. Video backup best practices covers that in full.
Why you can’t scale from one example
It’s tempting to take one video, measure it, and multiply. That’s the step that usually goes wrong, because the size of your source file is a poor predictor of the size of what we generate:
- A heavily compressed source usually grows. If you’ve already squeezed a video down hard, our renditions are encoded for smooth playback across devices and connections, and the encoded set can come out larger than the small file you started with.
- A high-bitrate source usually shrinks. Hand us a lightly compressed export and the delivery encodings are typically smaller than the original. In one recent case a 16 MB source video came out at 9.2 MB after processing.
- Length and resolution are the real drivers. A ten-minute 1080p video and a one-minute 1080p video start from wildly different places no matter what their source files weigh.
Two real libraries show how wide the spread is. One customer’s library of 146 videos totals about 23 GB — roughly 55 MB per video. Another customer, whose originals were already compressed hard before upload, averages about 2.8x the size of those originals. Both are normal. Neither is a rate you can apply to your own library.
So what should I plan for?
Plan from your plan’s allowance rather than from a per-video estimate. Each plan includes a set amount of storage:
| Plan | Included storage |
|---|---|
| Startup | 1 TB |
| Growth | 3 TB |
| Pro | 5 TB |
On one of our older plans? You get the same amount as the current plan yours matches — Starter gets 1 TB, Small Business 3 TB, and Video Pro 5 TB. If you’ve agreed a custom storage amount with us, that arrangement stands.
For most libraries that’s a lot of headroom. As a rough sense of scale rather than a planning figure: the library above, at about 55 MB per video, would fit somewhere in the region of eighteen thousand videos inside 1 TB. If you’re running a course or membership site with a few hundred lessons, storage is very unlikely to be your constraint.
How do I find out where I stand today?
The dashboard doesn’t currently show a storage total. Email support@swarmify.com and we’ll pull your current figure, usually along with how many videos it covers. If your library is large and you’d like to trim it, ask for the per-video report — it shows views and last-played dates so you can spot the dormant videos first.
Going over your included storage doesn’t shut anything off and doesn’t trigger a surprise charge. What happens if I go over my plan’s storage limit? walks through the options.
Don’t have an account yet?
Create one at swarmify.com/pricing/, then follow Get started with Swarmify’s SmartVideo to install the snippet and add your first video.