How Much Does It Cost to Host 100 HTML5 Games?

"How much will it cost to host 100 HTML5 games?" has a surprising answer: the storage is almost free. The part that can hurt is bandwidth, and whether your provider charges for it. This article shows the arithmetic with current Cloudflare R2 prices, three traffic scenarios, and what changes if you embed games from a distributor instead of hosting them.

• Storage: the total size of all game files, per GB per month.
• Requests: every file a player loads is a request. A game with 40 files costs 40 requests per cold start.
• Bandwidth (egress): the data you send to players. This is where bills grow with traffic.
• Everything around it: the web server or platform that serves your pages, domain, monitoring and your own time.

From Cloudflare's R2 pricing page, Standard storage:

Item	Price	Monthly free allowance
Storage	$0.015 per GB-month	10 GB-month
Class A operations (writes, lists)	$4.50 per million	1 million
Class B operations (reads)	$0.36 per million	10 million
Egress to the internet	Free	Not applicable

Prices change, so check the current page before you budget. Other object storage providers, such as Amazon S3, charge per GB for data sent out, so the same traffic can cost far more on a metered provider. The comparison below uses an illustrative rate of $0.09 per GB, which is a placeholder to show the effect, not a quote. Plug in your provider's real number.

Sizes vary widely. Simple 2D games can be a few MB; Unity or 3D builds are often tens of MB. For scenarios, we use averages:

• 10 MB per game: 1 GB for 100 games.
• 30 MB per game: 3 GB.
• 60 MB per game: 6 GB.

PlayKovo's upload limit is 250 MB per ZIP, but that is a ceiling, and most browser games are much smaller.

Assumptions: players download the whole game on a cold start, with no browser cache hits, which is the worst case. Requests are counted as Class B reads.

	Starter	Growing	Busy
Games x average size	100 x 10 MB	100 x 30 MB	100 x 60 MB
Stored data	1 GB	3 GB	6 GB
Plays per month	20,000	200,000	2,000,000
Files per play	30	40	40
Read requests	0.6 million	8 million	80 million
Data sent to players	200 GB	6,000 GB (6 TB)	120,000 GB (120 TB)

Cost on R2

	Starter	Growing	Busy
Storage (after 10 GB free)	$0	$0	$0
Reads (after 10 million free)	$0	$0	(80 - 10) x $0.36 = $25.20
Egress	$0	$0	$0
Total	$0	$0	about $25

Same traffic on a provider that charges $0.09 per GB for egress (illustrative)

	Starter	Growing	Busy
Egress	200 GB x $0.09 = $18	6,000 GB x $0.09 = $540	120,000 GB x $0.09 = $10,800

Real bills are lower because returning players reuse cached files and CDNs absorb repeat requests, but the gap explains why free egress matters so much for games, which are large files.

• Serving through another platform. If your site or a serverless function sits between the player and the storage bucket, you may pay that platform's bandwidth or compute. PlayKovo, for example, serves hosted game files through its own route backed by R2, so the front-end platform's bandwidth also matters in its own cost picture. Serving directly from the bucket on a custom domain avoids this layer.
• Caching cuts requests. Hashed file names with long cache lifetimes mean repeat visitors cost almost nothing; see how to prevent old cached files from breaking game updates.
• Writes are cheap. Uploading 100 games of 100 files is 10,000 write operations, well inside the free 1 million.
• Peaks. A viral day multiplies reads and egress. Free egress removes the bandwidth risk, but check any platform in front of it.
• Your time is the biggest cost. Updating, testing and replacing broken builds takes more effort than storage ever will.

	Self-host games	Embed from a distributor
Storage and bandwidth bill	Yours, as calculated above	None; the provider hosts the files
Updates and fixes	You do them	The provider updates the embed for everyone
Control	Full: layout, analytics, ads in your frame (depending on the licence)	Limited to what the provider allows
Licence needed	Permission to host the files	Permission to embed, usually stated in the provider's terms
Risk	Your uptime and your bill	The provider can change terms or remove a game
Typical cost for 100 games	Near zero to about $25 per month in the scenarios above, plus time	Near zero for hosting; check each provider's revenue and branding terms

With PlayKovo's catalog you do not upload or host game files at all: each game has an iframe snippet or feed entry, and the games are hosted and updated by PlayKovo. Read the catalog import guide and the Partner Terms before publishing.

storage_cost   = max(0, total_GB - 10) x 0.015
read_cost      = max(0, (plays x files_per_play / 1,000,000) - 10) x 0.36
egress_cost    = 0 on R2, or total_GB_sent x your_egress_rate on metered providers
monthly_total  = storage_cost + read_cost + egress_cost + platform_in_front

• Under 20 games and low traffic: embedding from a catalog is the simplest and cheapest.
• Own games or licensed files you must control: host them on object storage with free egress and long cache lifetimes.
• Large 3D builds with growing traffic: compare egress pricing before choosing a provider; this is the number that changes the bill.

Start with the numbers for your real file sizes, not averages: add up the folder sizes of your games and multiply by your plays. And keep an eye on your game list quality too; see how to choose your first 20 games.