There is no single "Resolve cloud" price, which is why searching for one is frustrating. There are three ways to run a shared Resolve project, and they cost $5 a month, $15 per terabyte a month, or nothing depending on which parts you use.
The three routes
1. Cloud Project Library — $5/month. Blackmagic hosts the Resolve project database. Multiple editors open the same project and see each other's bins and timelines live. Only the host pays; collaborators join free.
2. Cloud Project Library + Cloud Media Storage — $5/month + $15/TB/month. The same, plus the footage lives in Blackmagic's cloud too. This is the version people mean when they say "Resolve cloud is expensive."
3. Self-hosted project server — $0/month. Resolve Studio can point at a PostgreSQL database you run yourself, on a Mac mini in the corner or a NAS. Same multi-editor collaboration, no subscription. You pay in setup and maintenance instead.
Prices verified 2026-08-09.
What decides it
Not the price. The question is where your media already is, and it has three answers:
- Everyone is remote and the media is nowhere shared → route 2. You are paying $15/TB for the
problem of getting footage to people, and that is a real problem worth money.
- Everyone is remote but the media is already reachable (NAS with remote access, a mounted
cloud drive, LucidLink, JuiceMount) → route 1. Pay $5 for the database and stop there.
- Everyone is in one building → route 3 deserves a serious look. A local Postgres server on
the same network as the media is the setup most facilities ran for years before cloud was an option.
The trap is assuming route 2 because it is the one Blackmagic markets. For a team already running shared storage, the $15/TB line is buying something you own.
The maths on route 2
At $15/TB/month, a 4 TB project is $60 a month, $720 a year. That is roughly the cost of a 4 TB NVMe drive every single year, for storage you do not keep.
That is not automatically a bad deal — you are also buying availability, redundancy and the fact that Resolve talks to it natively. But it should be a decision, not a default.
Route 3 is less exotic than it sounds
A self-hosted project server is a PostgreSQL database Resolve Studio connects to. Blackmagic documents the setup and ships the tooling. What it costs you is:
- a machine that stays on
- somebody who can restore a database backup when it matters
- no cloud access unless you add a VPN
The last one is what usually kills it for distributed teams, and it is why the $5 cloud library is such good value: it removes the one hard part of self-hosting without dragging your media along with it.
Before you pay per terabyte
Whichever route you pick, the recurring cost scales with how much media you keep — and most projects carry a lot they no longer reference. Transcodes nobody chose, dailies nobody revisits, duplicate deliverables.
On route 2 that is $15/TB/month for the privilege. On routes 1 and 3 it is drive space you could have back. Clip Sweeper finds what is genuinely unreferenced across every project on a drive, which is worth doing before you decide how many terabytes you are paying to sync.