Game Dev Cheat Sheet

CCU Cost Estimator

Estimate monthly server hosting costs for your multiplayer game based on concurrent users, architecture, tick rate, and cloud provider.

Multiplayer game server costs depend on many factors: how many players are online simultaneously (CCU), your server architecture, tick rate, packet size, and which cloud provider you use. This estimator models costs across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Hetzner so you can budget before committing to infrastructure.

Frame time budget
33.3 ms
Bandwidth per player
15.0 KB/s
Total monthly bandwidth
12.1 TB

1,000 concurrent players

256 B

Monthly Cost Comparison

AWS (EC2)$3.3k - $5.5k/mo
Google Cloud$3.1k - $5.3k/mo
Azure$3.2k - $5.4k/mo
Hetzner$547.50 - $1.1k/mo

Provider Breakdown

AWS (EC2)

Auto-scaling, global reach

Monthly cost$3.3k - $5.5k
Cost per CCU/mo$3.302 - $5.492
Bandwidth/mo12.1 TB
Instances needed25

Google Cloud

ML integration, global reach

Monthly cost$3.1k - $5.3k
Cost per CCU/mo$3.126 - $5.316
Bandwidth/mo12.1 TB
Instances needed25

Azure

Enterprise, Xbox integration

Monthly cost$3.2k - $5.4k
Cost per CCU/mo$3.179 - $5.369
Bandwidth/mo12.1 TB
Instances needed25

Hetzner

Budget, EU-focused

Monthly cost$547.50 - $1.1k
Cost per CCU/mo$0.547 - $1.095
Bandwidth/mo12.1 TB
Instances needed25
Included bandwidth20 TB

Prices are estimates based on publicly available pricing as of March 2026. Actual costs vary by region, commitment, and usage patterns.

P2P with relay architecture significantly reduces server costs but increases client bandwidth and may affect latency.