belaBOX Cloud vs IRLToolkit vs your own VPS: picking an IRL relay
By Elan Harpaz · Published 2026-07-06 · Updated 2026-08-06
The relay is what turns a lost signal into a BRB screen. The four ways to run one differ by a factor of ten in price, and the thing you are really choosing is where OBS lives.
Your encoder tops out at 1080p60. A higher-end encoder would go further.
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| Component | Pick | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Camera | DJI Osmo Pocket 3 Gimbal cam with great low light, USB webcam mode, and DJI mic pairing. The IRL favorite. Buy on Amazon | $499 | Buy on Amazon |
| Encoder | Orange Pi 5 + belaBOX Dedicated HDMI-in encoder running the free, open-source belaBOX firmware with SRTLA bonding. The DIY backpack heart. Buy on Amazon | $150 | Buy on Amazon |
| Connection | Netgear Nighthawk M6 5G mobile router with an ethernet port, so you wire it straight to the encoder. Buy on Amazon | $517.22 | Buy on Amazon |
| Data Plan | Visible Unlimited Truly unlimited data on the Verizon network. The IRL favorite for a cheap single line. Learn more | ~$25/mo | Learn more |
| Bonding | belaBOX SRTLA Bonds several connections to your relay, built into the belaBOX encoder. Free. Learn more | Free (with belaBOX) | Learn more |
| Relay / VPS | belaBOX Cloud Managed SRT relay plus phone control to start/stop the encoder. The cheap, popular choice. Learn more | ~$10/mo | Learn more |
| Power Bank / Portable Battery | SHARGEEK 140 (20K, 140W) High-capacity, high-wattage bank that runs a power-hungry encoder all day. Buy on Amazon | $84.90 | Buy on Amazon |
The Relay Turns a Drop Into a BRB is one of the named rules here, and it is the reason this component exists at all: platforms end a broadcast when ingest stops, so something has to hold the platform-side connection open while your uplink recovers. Every option below does that. What separates them by a factor of ten in price is not the relaying. It is whether a scene switcher runs in the cloud too.
| Option | Tracked monthly | Cloud OBS | You maintain it | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| belaBOX Cloud | $10 | A DIY belaBOX rig, which is most people reading this | ||
| Self-hosted VPS | $20 | Only if you install it | Technical streamers, or several people sharing one box | |
| Home PC as OBS | $0 | Local, on hardware you own | Testing, and streams close enough to home to trust the power | |
| IRLToolkit | $100 | Streamers who cannot be near a computer while live |
What the $90 a month actually buys
belaBOX Cloud gives you an SRT endpoint that speaks SRTLA, plus phone control to start and stop the encoder in your bag. When your links die, it holds the platform connection. What it does not do is decide what viewers look at, because there is no scene switcher up there: something else has to be showing your BRB card, which in practice means OBS on a machine you run. IRLToolkit is that machine, rented. Cloud OBS with your scenes loaded, offline protection that cuts to a holding scene by itself, and control from your phone.
The gap is $90 a month, or $1,080 a year, which is more than the entire under-$1,000 backpack build on this site costs once. That is the honest way to frame it: a year of IRLToolkit is a second rig. It is worth it when you genuinely cannot be at a keyboard, when you are streaming alone in another country and a black screen for six minutes costs you the session. It is not worth it because it sounds more professional.
The default for a belaBOX build. It speaks SRTLA natively, so the bonding in your encoder has something to bond to.
The pick when nobody is at the PC. You are renting the scene switcher, not the relay.
The two cheap options, and why they lose
A self-hosted VPS at $20 tracked runs SRTLA and OBS on a box in a datacentre, which is the same product as IRLToolkit for a fifth of the price, minus the part you are actually paying IRLToolkit for: somebody else keeping it running while you are on a train. You are the on-call engineer. That is a fine trade if you enjoy it and a terrible one at hour three of an outdoor stream.
Running OBS on your home PC costs nothing and works genuinely well, right up to the point where the failure you were protecting against happens at your house instead of on your back. A power cut at home ends a stream two states away. It is the correct answer for testing the workflow and for hybrid desk-and-street streams, and the wrong one for a rig whose whole purpose is being far from home.
About this guide. Written by Elan Harpaz. We do not lab-test hardware. Every quality verdict on this page is a planning budget computed from a published model, and every price is a tracked estimate rather than a live one. How the numbers are derived: methodology. How picks are chosen: editorial policy.
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