Dacast

You get your live streams and recordings on your own website, under your brand, rather than only on social platforms, and you can charge viewers through a built-in paywall. If you run conferences, graduations, sports fixtures, church services or internal town halls, this gives you a hosted stream played in a white-label HTML5 player. Dacast is the San Francisco based video platform behind it.

What it is for

If you produce events for several clients, Dacast’s own pages describe running them from isolated accounts, presenting each client’s stream without Dacast watermarks, duplicating past event set-ups as templates, and selling tickets or pay-per-view access per client. You also save replay work: every live stream is recorded to the on-demand library, so the replay is ready once the event ends. You bring your own production kit (a software or hardware encoder) and Dacast handles ingest, transcoding, delivery, recording and playback. Those pages describe four main groups of buyers: corporate and government communicators, education and training teams, houses of worship, and event producers.

Features

You get ingest, hosting, ticketing, access control and analytics in one platform, with some limits set by plan.

• Live ingest. You can send RTMP, RTMPS, SRT or HLS and get adaptive bitrate transcoding and Full HD 1080p output. The Starter plan lists 3 live transcoding channels and Event lists 10, with unlimited channels from Scale upwards. You can also go live from a browser or phone.
• Simulcast. You reach social audiences as well as your own site by adding destinations from the Engagement tab, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, X or any custom RTMP endpoint. The plan comparison caps simulcast time at 5, 10, 28 and 40 hours for Starter, Event, Scale and Custom.
• Video hosting. You keep recordings organised in an on-demand library with folders, live and VOD playlists, bulk upload (including from Google Drive), encoding recipes and VOD-to-live replays. Scale adds chapter markers and advanced library management.
• Event tools. You get live stream monitoring, availability scheduling and an on-player countdown on the Event plan.
• Monetisation. You can earn from your video through pay-per-view, weekly, monthly or quarterly subscriptions, group tickets that give access to several videos, promo codes, free preview clips, and pre-, mid- and post-roll ads. Dacast says payments work in more than 135 currencies. The paywall is included from the Event plan and sold as an add-on on Starter.
• Access control. You decide who can watch with password protection, domain and referrer restrictions, country and IP restrictions, tokenised links and AES encryption. DRM and AES for on-demand video arrive on Scale.
• Analytics. You see real-time concurrent viewers, viewer locations, watch time per title, plays per device and paywall revenue, plus a Google Analytics integration.

Plans and pricing

You get unlimited concurrent viewers, live recording, ad-free playback, custom branding and 24/7 support on every plan, so your choice comes down to data transfer (bandwidth) and storage. Dacast sells annual subscriptions sized by those two measures.

Plan	Price	Billing	Includes
Starter	$39 per month	Billed annually	2.4 TB data per year, 500 GB storage, 3 live transcoding channels, simulcast, VOD hosting, analytics
Event	$63 per month	Billed annually	6 TB data upfront, 250 GB storage, Starter features plus monitoring, scheduling, countdown, paywall and ads
Scale	$165 per month	Billed annually	24 TB data per year, 2,000 GB storage, unlimited channels, DRM and AES for VOD, 3 team members, player CNAME, phone support, API access
Custom	Contact sales	Quote	Everything in Scale plus M3U8 links, custom SLAs, migrations, large-scale events, 5 team members

You pay no set-up fees, according to Dacast’s FAQ, which also says Event plan bandwidth expires a year after purchase. Prices as shown on its pricing page on 31 October 2026, in US dollars, with no tax note. The same page lists overage at $0.30 per GB of data and $0.15 per GB of storage, extra team seats at $10 per user per month, and Multi-CDN plus China live and VOD delivery as paid add-ons.

Free plan and trial

You can test Dacast for 14 days without paying, and its product pages say no credit card is needed to start the free trial. There is no free plan.

Integrations and API

You can stream from production tools you may already have, as Dacast names OBS Studio, Wirecast, vMix and StreamYard as encoders that connect with a stream key, alongside any RTMP or SRT compatible hardware. Developers get a RESTful JSON API for live channels, VOD, playlists, folders, uploads, embed codes and analytics, a Player API for controlling playback from your own code, iOS and Android player SDKs, PHP and Node.js SDKs, and an MCP server that lets AI assistants work with your streams and analytics. The API page states that API access is limited to the Scale and Custom plans. Its terms also cover PayPal as a way to pay and to collect viewer payments through the paywall.

Deployment and platforms

You run everything from a web dashboard, and your viewers watch in an HTML5 player embedded on any web page, on desktop, mobile or smart TV browsers, because Dacast is a cloud service. Its service level agreement commits to 99.9% monthly availability. Delivery runs over Amazon CloudFront and Akamai, and for mainland China Dacast says it holds an ICP licence (ICP 19031887) and uses a CDN partner with points of presence inside the mainland. Its site does not list a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification.

Company

You contract with Dacast Inc., and its product pages say it has served customers since 2008. Its contact page lists offices in San Francisco and Beijing. According to its about page, Dacast announced the acquisition of the video hosting platform vzaar on 13 March 2019.

What to check before buying

These checks help you avoid overage charges, lapsed bandwidth and unplanned add-on or renewal costs.

• Work out total viewer hours before choosing a plan. Dacast’s own calculator converts bitrate and audience into data, and overage is $0.30 per GB, or the stream stops if overage protection is off.
• The Event plan’s 6 TB is bought upfront and lapses 12 months after purchase, so plan when your events fall.
• Ticketing needs the paywall, which is an add-on on Starter. Viewer refunds come out of your wallet balance, and Dacast takes its fees before payout, so ask what the paywall commission is, because the pricing page does not publish it.
• If you plan to automate channels or pull analytics into another system, budget for Scale or Custom, as Starter and Event have no API access.
• Subscriptions renew automatically. The terms ask for written notice and a separate cancellation form, ideally 72 hours before the renewal date, and paid plans are generally non-refundable.
• Audiences in mainland China and multi-CDN failover are extra-cost add-ons, so get a quote for them before a large event.

Dacast pricing

What Dacast publishes about its pricing, checked on its own pricing page. Prices change, so confirm the current terms with Dacast before you buy.

Pricing model	Subscription
Published starting price	$39/month billed annually (Starter)
Free plan	No
Free trial	Yes

Each plan carries a bandwidth and storage allowance; overage $0.30/GB data and $0.15/GB storage; extra team seats $10 per user per month; Multi-CDN and China delivery are add-ons. Event plan ($63/month billed annually) gets 6 TB upfront.

Source: dacast.com, checked 31 October 2026.

Alternatives to Dacast

Other directory profiles that do the same job as Dacast.

• vMix
• Wirecast
• RingCentral Events
• BoxCast
• Restream
• Castr

Compare every listed option in live streaming software for events.

Related on Event Tech News

You can compare Dacast with similar streaming services and read up on the tools that feed it here.

• AV and streaming directory, the full list of streaming and production tools we cover.
• BoxCast, another subscription streaming platform with its own player and hosting.
• Castr, a live streaming and multistreaming service with an embeddable player.
• Restream, if your main need is sending one stream to many social platforms.
• OBS Studio, the free encoder Dacast lists first for RTMP and SRT ingest.
• vMix and Wirecast, production software Dacast names as compatible encoders.
• StreamYard, a browser studio that can feed a Dacast channel.
• Where OBS Studio fits in an event streaming setup, for the encoder side of a Dacast workflow.
• StreamYard for a remote speaker event, useful if your speakers join remotely.
• Event platforms connect AI assistants to operational data, background on MCP servers like the one Dacast offers.

Sources: dacast.com pricing, dacast.com video API, dacast.com monetisation, dacast.com multistreaming, dacast.com security, dacast.com live streaming, dacast.com SRT, dacast.com China delivery, dacast.com SLA, dacast.com terms, dacast.com about, dacast.com contact, checked 31 October 2026.