Skip to content
Academy
Best practices

3 min readbeginner

CDN pricing comparison

Bandwidth dominates most CDN bills, but providers price it in very different ways. Here's how the major pricing models work, and how the numbers compare.

CoversCDN

The three CDN pricing models#

Most CDN pricing reduces to one of three models. Per-GB egress pricing charges for every gigabyte delivered to users. It’s the traditional model, used by Bunny, Fastly, Akamai and CDN77. It ties your bill directly to traffic, which means costs spike with success: a viral post or a product launch shows up on your invoice.

Request-based pricing charges per request served, regardless of size. This is Edge’s model: $0.25 per million requests with bandwidth included, so a million small API responses and a million large images cost the same. It suits sites whose traffic is heavy in bytes rather than requests (media, downloads, images), because the expensive part (bandwidth) isn’t metered.

Flat or plan-based pricing bundles CDN into a subscription, as Cloudflare does. It’s predictable at small scale, but limits and enterprise features typically push growing sites into quote-based contracts where pricing is opaque.

Provider pricing at a glance#

Published rates as compared on our CDN comparison pages. Follow the links for full feature-by-feature breakdowns.

Provider Egress fees Pricing model Minimum spend
Edge Free $0.25 per million requests None (free tier included)
Bunny.net $0.01–0.06/GB Per-GB egress None
Cloudflare Free Plans; enterprise quote required Limited free tier
Fastly $0.08–0.28/GB Per-GB egress + requests $50/month
Akamai $0.10/GB+ Negotiated contracts Annual contract
CDN77 $0.049/GB+ Per-GB egress None

What the numbers mean in practice#

Per-GB rates look small until you multiply them. At Fastly’s $0.08–0.28/GB, delivering 10 TB a month costs $800 or more; at Akamai’s $0.10/GB+, the same traffic runs past $1,000, typically under an annual contract with quote-based pricing. Bunny and CDN77 are far cheaper per gigabyte ($0.01–0.06/GB and $0.049/GB+ respectively), but the bill still scales linearly with every byte you serve.

Cloudflare and Edge both drop egress fees entirely, and differ in what you pay for instead. Cloudflare uses plan tiers, with enterprise pricing available only through sales conversations. Edge meters requests: a free tier covers 3 deployments and 500,000 requests a month, then pay-as-you-go at $0.25 per million requests, with enterprise volume pricing published from $499/month including a 99.99% SLA. There’s no minimum spend and no contract.

Also compare what’s bundled. DDoS protection, SSL certificates, and image optimisation are add-ons or higher-tier features on some providers; Edge includes them in the free tier, and delivers from 988 edge locations, more than any of the centralised networks in the table.

How to choose#

Match the pricing model to your traffic shape rather than the headline rate.

  • Heavy bandwidth: video, downloads, and image-rich sites move many bytes per request. Zero-egress pricing removes the largest cost, so request-based billing wins decisively.
  • Unpredictable traffic: if traffic can spike, per-GB pricing turns success into a billing risk. Prefer models with caps, free tiers, and no bandwidth metering.
  • Enterprise scale: at high volume, insist on published pricing and an SLA. Quote-only contracts make budgeting and comparison impossible.

Price your workload on Edge#

Free for 500k requests a month, $0.25 per million after that. Bandwidth is never a line item. See CDN pricing for the full rate card, or browse all CDN comparisons.

Next steps

Keep learning