BlazingCDN vs Gcore: they bill the minute, we bill the terabyte
Their video delivery starts at €0.00064 per minute watched. That is about €5.69 a terabyte at 4K, and about €57 a terabyte for the same minute on a phone at 1.5 Mbps. We charge $5 down to $2.50 a terabyte, whatever bitrate your viewers land on.
Any bitrate, any rendition, one meter. The whole tier table is printed on the pricing page and you can read it before you talk to anyone.
The same €0.00064 a delivered minute, converted at 4K, at 1080p and on a phone. On the CDN side their published ladder ends at €0.02 per GB, which is €20 a terabyte, and a better rate exists only as a custom Enterprise deal.
Or open the full pricing table and read the rate yourself.
Which one actually fits your traffic
We would rather lose the click than lose a month of your team’s time. If you are shopping for a Gcore alternative, start here: the honest split, including the six reasons to buy them instead of us.
Pick BlazingCDN if
- Delivery is the line you are trying to shrink, and you want one meter for it
- Your video is adaptive and most viewers land on the mid or low renditions
- You move 50 TB a month or more and want a printed rate at that volume
- You already have DNS, WAF and cloud you are happy with, and only the terabytes hurt
Pick Gcore if
- Their network is roughly eight times larger: they publish 210+ PoPs and 200+ Tbps, we publish 25+. If reach where we are thin is why you are shopping, buy them.
- You want one vendor for CDN, DNS, WAAP, GPU cloud, object storage, managed Kubernetes and databases. We sell delivery.
- You want video handled for you: transcoding free up to 1080p, a built-in player, AI processing, restreaming, 24/7 live channels, and DRM on enterprise plans.
- Your streams are high bitrate and mostly watched end to end, which is where their per minute rate lands closest to our entry rate.
- Their WAF and DDoS protection is the reason you are buying. We do access control, not a security suite.
- You move less than 5 TB a month. Their FREE and START plans are cheaper than anything we can price for you.
Video: the two products are not the same shape
Read this part before the table, otherwise the comparison is misleading. Gcore Video Streaming is a video platform: it ingests, transcodes, packages, stores, analyses and plays. Our Video CDN is a delivery layer. The only line that compares cleanly is delivery, so that is the line we compare.
BlazingCDN Video CDN
A delivery layer. Your encoder or media server produces HLS or DASH, we cache and deliver it worldwide and bill you per terabyte.
Gcore Video Streaming
A whole platform. Ingest, transcoding, packaging, storage, AI processing and a built-in player, with delivery billed per minute watched.
A minute of video, converted into a terabyte
On their pay as you go plan, delivery starts at €0.00064 per delivered minute, with volume discounts. A minute is not a unit you can compare against a terabyte, so convert it. How much 1,000 minutes weigh depends only on your bitrate, and their rate per minute does not move when your bitrate does.
1,000 minutes weigh about 113 GB
1,000 minutes weigh about 38 GB
1,000 minutes weigh about 11 GB
The same terabyte is $5 to $2.50 here, whatever bitrate your viewers land on.
Be fair about what you are buying. Their minute also pays for transcoding, which is free up to 1080p on that plan, plus storage, AI processing and a player. Ours is delivery only, and the comparison holds when you already run an encoder, which most streaming teams do. It also cuts the other way: at 4K their per-minute rate lands close to our entry rate, and that is exactly the case where their platform earns its keep.
Side by side
Pricing model
Per terabyte delivered
Plan fee plus per GB on the CDN. Per delivered minute on the video platform
Published price
Yes. $5 down to $2.50 per TB in progressive tiers, the full table printed on the pricing page
Yes, for the three CDN plans and for streaming. The CDN ladder ends at €0.02 per GB, and better rates are Enterprise, which is custom
Regional pricing
One rate across our regions
One published overage rate per plan, not a per-destination table
Heavy video and large files
What the network is built and priced for
Carried on the CDN, or on Video Streaming, which bills per minute stored and per minute delivered
Time to a number
Same day, by email
Published, with a calculator. Both of us pass this one
The video you deleted, you still pay for
This is not our characterisation of their product. It is the answer to their own FAQ question, on their own pricing page, under storage billing.
“If you upload a 1,000-minute video and delete it after one day, that 1,000 minutes still counts toward your monthly storage peak. Deleting a video mid-month does not reduce the storage charge for that month.”
Gcore Streaming Platform pricing, FAQ on storage billing. Checked 29 August 2026. Read it on their site
What it means in practice
Storage is metered on your peak stored minutes in a calendar month, not your average. Upload a large back catalogue to test something, delete it the next morning, and the peak is already set for the month. Housekeeping does not lower the bill until the month rolls over.
Why ours works differently
We do not bill video by the minute at all, stored or delivered. Your library sits in your own S3, Wasabi or FTP, or in our permanent cache at $0.02 per GB a month with the first 500 GB included, and delivery is billed as terabytes that left the edge. Delete a file and it stops costing you immediately.
Tell us your monthly terabytes. We send back the number.
No account needed to get a price. One email, one answer.
The same 200 TB, two invoices
Same 200 TB a month, priced from both published tables. Nothing here is negotiated on either side.
200 TB billed across our progressive tiers, $3.83 a terabyte effective. One meter. Requests are not billed, cache fill is not billed, and the whole table is printed on the pricing page.
The same 200 TB on their PRO plan at list: €100 a month, 5 TB included, then 195,000 GB at €0.02. Enterprise pricing is custom and may be lower, but this is the number their published table gives you.
Run your own volume through it
50 TB a month
$4.30 a terabyte effective, one meter. The same 50 TB on their PRO plan at list is €1,000: €100 plus 45,000 GB at €0.02.
200 TB a month
Where most video and software teams sit. $3.83 a terabyte effective. The same month on PRO at list is €4,000.
1 PB a month
1,000 TB billed down through the tiers, $3.32 a terabyte effective. On PRO at list that month is €20,000, which is well past the point where you would be negotiating an Enterprise contract instead.
Our pricing is progressive, like tax brackets: $5 on the first 5 TB, stepping down to $2.50 on traffic above 1,000 TB. Gcore figures are their published euro list rates for the PRO plan. We have not converted currencies anywhere on this page, so every comparison treats a euro as a dollar, which flatters their side of the table.
The three questions everyone asks next
Your network is bigger than ours
It is, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. They publish 210+ PoPs and 200+ Tbps; we publish 25+ locations and 26 ms average latency across the US and EU. What decides it is where your viewers actually are, so test both on your own files. Our numbers are on Performance Metrics.
Do I have to move everything?
No. Most teams move the heavy traffic first, video, builds and downloads, and leave the rest where it is.
What about WAAP and DNS?
Keep them. Their WAAP and DNS are real products and we do not compete with them. Split by workload: protected routes and dynamic pages stay where they are, the terabytes move.
Keep it. Move the heavy traffic to us.
You do not have to leave. Keep your DNS, WAAP, cloud and object storage exactly where they are, and point the terabytes that actually cost money at a network priced for them.
- One pull zone, pointed at the origin you already use
- From $5 down to $2.50 per TB, published, no negotiation to see it
- Roll back by changing one CNAME if you do not like the result
Get your rate
Four fields. We reply with a written price for your volume, usually the same day.
We use this only to price your traffic and reply to you. See our privacy policy.
What the plan costs before your traffic is counted
We sell a rate. They sell a tier, and the tier that carries heavy traffic is the expensive part.
Where you start
$5 per TB delivered, pay as you go, with a $25 monthly minimum that covers your first 5 TB
FREE at €0 with 1 TB included, then START at €35 a month with 1.5 TB
Mid tier
The same tier table. Your rate steps down as volume grows, with nothing to re-sign
PRO at €100 a month with 5 TB included, overage €0.02 per GB
The tier that carries heavy traffic
$2.50 per TB on the top tier, and no platform fee at any volume
Enterprise, custom. The published ladder stops at PRO, so from roughly 50 TB up you are asking for a quote
Commitment
None. Monthly, stop whenever you like
Monthly on the published plans. Enterprise is a contract
What gets billed
Delivered traffic only. Pull cache is never billed. The optional permanent cache on Video CDN is $0.02 per GB a month after the first 500 GB
Plan fee, traffic over the included volume, requests above 1 billion at €0.75 per million, and image optimizations above the included 100,000
Gcore plan prices are their published figures from the Edge Network pricing page, checked 29 August 2026. Prices there exclude VAT. Enterprise pricing is not published on either side of this row.
CDN feature by feature
Static files, downloads, images and APIs. Everything on our side is taken from our product documentation, and we have left in the rows where they are ahead and the rows where we are level.
Routing
Anycast with built in failover. 50+ signals weighed per request, routes re-evaluated in real time
Anycast and GeoDNS routing across a network they publish as 210+ PoPs and 200+ Tbps
Cache control
TTL up to 365 days, a separate TTL per HTTP status code, minimum requests to cache from 1 to 10, inherit or ignore origin headers
Customizable TTL, cache sharding, content prefetching, large file delivery optimization, and Always online to serve stale when the origin fails
Per-path rules
Locations: a rule set matched to an HTTP route, so different parts of one resource get different delivery settings. Extension proxying, URL parameter truncation, HLS and DASH handling and image processing, all per path
Rules matched on a path pattern per CDN resource, set in the panel or through the API
Purge
By path, in bulk, or total purge in one action. Plus cache warm-up through the API before a release
Purge by URL, file or directory
Origin Shield
Included. Automatic, or pinned to a region you choose
Origin shielding and origin groups, both included. Level with us on this row
Compression
gzip, Brotli and zstd. At the edge or at origin, with a separate cache per encoding
Brotli and Gzip
Delivery speed control
A download speed cap you set per account, per domain or per URL, plus rate matched delivery so one big file does not take the whole pipe. Request intensity limits per client or subnet on top of that
Traffic consumption control caps how much a resource may serve in total, plus a download speed limit per connection, set statically or through URL query strings, and available inside their path rules
Signed URLs
Validity window, signature bound to a client IP, a limit of 1 to 5 unique IPs per link, two secrets for rotation, partial path signing and URL encryption
Secure token authentication, with access control lists and referrer validation alongside it
Country and IP lists
Country allowlist or blocklist, IP allowlist or blocklist with mask support, referrer allow and deny lists and cookie checks. Set per resource, with no security plan to buy
Access control lists and geo-blocking on the CDN resource, plus IP allowlists and referrer validation
Security stack
Their round
Access control only, as in the two rows above. No WAF, no DDoS scrubbing, no bot management, and we do not claim any
L3, L4 and L7 DDoS protection built in, and WAAP as a product, listed On-demand on every plan. This is a real security suite and it is a reason to buy them
Certificates
Let’s Encrypt at no extra charge, renewed automatically. Upload your own, in bulk, auto-assigned to matching domains
Free Let’s Encrypt SSL, custom certificates, SNI support and TLS version control
Origins and import
HTTP(S), S3, Swift, Wasabi and S3 compatible buckets, FTP, SFTP, rclone and rsync. Pull or push, pre-import or lazy, with a callback on the result
HTTP(S) origins and origin groups, plus their own S3 compatible object storage
Image processing
One file at origin, every variant from a query string on your own domain. Variants are cached like any other file and cost nothing extra
Image Stack: WebP and AVIF conversion, resize and crop from query strings. 100,000 optimizations included on START and PRO, then €1 per 10,000
Logs and metrics
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account. Raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on
Detailed statistics, raw logs export, a built-in log viewer and a Grafana integration. Level with us on this row
Running it from an agent
One MCP server, 52 typed tools: pull zones, cache and purge, metrics, domains and certificates, Cloud Storage and Video CDN. Read-only by default, with cache purge and warm-up; create and update are opt-in; deletes are a second opt-in limited to custom domains and Video CDN resources, and deleting pull zones, buckets or accounts is not implemented at all. Public on npm as @blazingcdn/mcp
Full REST API, Terraform and Grafana, plus an official MCP server for the Gcore API. Its predefined toolsets are cloud first, instances, bare metal, GPU, networking, storage, AI and billing, with no CDN toolset out of the box. CDN purge and rules tools exist in the SDK and have to be switched on by hand with wildcard patterns
Our column is taken from our own product documentation. The Gcore column is taken from their CDN product page, their Edge Network pricing page and their public MCP server repository, checked 29 August 2026. They ship often, so check the current page before you decide.
Video feature by feature
Encoding and transcoding
Their round
Not included, by design. Bring your own encoder or media server. Red5 Pro and Ant Media are documented and tested
Included, and free up to 1080p on the pay as you go plan. 2K and 4K free on request
Player and live ingest
Their round
Bring your own player, any HLS or DASH one. Ingest stays with your media server
Built-in web player and restreaming to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or any RTMP target. Primary and backup ingest with automatic failover is on enterprise plans
How you are billed
Per terabyte delivered, on progressive tiers from $5 down to $2.50. Nothing per minute, nothing per view
Per delivered minute and per peak stored minute. Delivery from €0.00064 a minute, which is about €5.69 to €57 a terabyte depending on bitrate
Formats delivered
HLS in .ts or .m4s containers, MPEG-DASH, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming for the legacy players you still have to serve
HLS, LL-HLS, MPEG-DASH and LL-DASH CMAF
Chunk and start-up control
Chunks of 2, 4, 5, 10 or 30 seconds, keyframe aligned. First chunks pre-cached so playback starts fast, and initial buffer tuning for .mp4
Decided by their transcoding pipeline. Low latency is offered as LL-HLS and LL-DASH profiles rather than as chunk settings you control
AI on your library
Their round
Not offered. We deliver bytes, we do not analyse them
AI video processing built in, with 5,000 minutes included free on the pay as you go plan
Protecting a stream
Signed links bound to a client IP with a 1 to 5 IP limit, partial path signing, URL encryption, two rotating secrets, plus country, referrer and cookie rules
Secure token authentication, access control lists, geo-blocking and referrer validation. Advanced DRM is an Enterprise option
Where the library lives
Your S3, Wasabi, FTP, or our permanent cache at $0.02 per GB a month with the first 500 GB included. Three geographic copies, checksum validation, self healing after a drive failure
Inside their platform, billed on your peak stored minutes for the calendar month
Getting out again
Your encoder, your manifests, your storage. Leaving is a CNAME change, and nothing has to be re-encoded
The library and the transcodes sit in their platform, so leaving means standing up ingest and packaging somewhere else first
Rows marked “Their round” are the ones where Gcore Video Streaming is genuinely the better tool. We have left them in because a comparison we win on every line is not a comparison. If you have no encoder and no player, their platform does more of the job than we do. Gcore figures taken from their Streaming Platform pricing page and product page, checked 29 August 2026.
Six places where we win
Not opinions. Each of these is a line item you can check on an invoice or in a config screen.
€20 a TB against $5 to $2.50
Their best published CDN rate is €0.02 per GB on the PRO plan, which is €20 a terabyte, and the published ladder stops there. Ours starts at $5 and steps down to $2.50, with nothing to re-sign on the way.
Bitrate does not move our price
A per minute rate charges the same for a 4K stream and a phone on 1.5 Mbps. Converted to terabytes that is about €5.69 against about €57 for exactly the same money. We bill the terabyte, so the rendition mix your viewers pick never moves the rate.
Delete it and the bill stops
Their storage meter runs on peak stored minutes for the whole calendar month, so deleting a video mid-month does not reduce that month’s charge. We bill terabytes that left the edge, and storage by what is actually sitting there.
zstd, not just Brotli
gzip, Brotli and zstd, at the edge or at origin, with a separate cache per encoding. Their published compression list is Brotli and Gzip.
Your rate steps down on its own
Our tiers are marginal, like tax brackets, so the same account pays $5 on the first 5 TB and $2.50 above 1,000 TB with nothing to re-sign and no plan to upgrade. On their side a better rate means moving FREE to START to PRO, and past PRO it means asking for a quote.
Cut at delivery, not at encode
Clip to the millisecond on the delivery request, stitch several clips into one stream, pick audio and video tracks per request, and set chunk length and keyframe alignment yourself. Nothing has to be re-encoded to change any of it.
Splitting the traffic takes an afternoon
Create a pull zone
Point it at the same origin your Gcore resource already pulls from. Nothing changes on your side.
Move the heavy paths
Video segments, installers, patches, archives. The paths that generate the terabytes on your invoice.
Compare one invoice
One billing cycle is enough to see the difference. If it is not better, change the CNAME back.
Comparing more than one? See also Bunny CDN pricing, CDN77 pricing and KeyCDN pricing, or start from our CDN pricing comparison.