3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.

It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page.

So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai.

I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.

I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.

Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous.

A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for .

For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.