CDN Pricing Compared: What You Should Actually Pay
CDN pricing ranges from free to thousands a month for the same traffic, depending on the provider and the fine print. Here's how the major CDNs actually price bandwidth, requests, and regional egress — with real numbers — so you can size your bill before you commit instead of getting surprised on the invoice.
Key takeaways
- CDN pricing is driven by two meters — bandwidth (per GB) and requests (per 10k or million) — plus a big regional multiplier for Asia-Pacific, India, and South America.
- Models split into flat/unmetered (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN tiers) for predictable bills and pure usage-based (CloudFront, Fastly, GCP, Azure) for precise-but-spiky costs.
- NA/EU egress ballparks: BunnyCDN ~$0.01–0.06/GB, Fastly/CloudFront/GCP ~$0.08–0.12/GB at low volume, dropping with scale; Cloudflare offers unmetered standard bandwidth.
- Hidden costs — request fees, origin egress on cache misses, low cache-hit ratios, TLS/WAF/log add-ons, and provider minimums — routinely beat the headline per-GB rate.
- Pull your real monthly GB and request counts, weight expensive regions, and optimize caching/compression to cut 30–60% off the meter before choosing a provider.
How CDN Pricing Actually Works
A CDN (content delivery network) caches your static assets — images, CSS, JavaScript, video, downloads — on servers near your users so pages load faster and your origin server does less work. CDN pricing almost always comes down to two meters: how much data you serve (bandwidth, billed per GB), and how many requests you serve (billed per 10,000 or per million HTTP/HTTPS requests).
The trap is that the same terabyte of traffic can cost $0, $20, or $85+ depending on the provider and where your users are. Three variables move the price the most: the per-GB egress rate, whether requests are billed separately, and the region — delivering to North America and Europe is cheap, while Asia-Pacific, India, South America, the Middle East, and Australia often cost two to five times more per GB.
Before comparing vendors, find two numbers in your analytics: your monthly egress in GB and your monthly request count. Without those, every quote is a guess.
See CDN pricingOn the fastest servers in the North — free migration, 24/7 human support.See CDN pricingThe Per-GB and Per-Request Numbers, Compared
Here are realistic 2026 ballparks for North America and Europe delivery. Always confirm against the live pricing page, and weight Asia-Pacific traffic upward.
Two pricing philosophies dominate. Flat-rate, unmetered providers (Cloudflare, BunnyCDN's volume tiers) keep your bill predictable. Pure usage-based providers (AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, Azure, Fastly) scale precisely with traffic but make a surprise spike — or a misconfigured cache — expensive.
- Cloudflare: free plan with unmetered bandwidth for standard web assets; Pro $20/mo, Business $200/mo; metered egress only on enterprise/specialized tiers
- BunnyCDN: ~$0.01–0.06/GB depending on region, $1/mo minimum — among the cheapest pay-as-you-go options
- Fastly: ~$0.08–0.12/GB in North America/Europe plus ~$0.0075–0.01 per 10k requests; ~$50/mo minimum
- AWS CloudFront: 1 TB/mo always-free, then ~$0.085/GB (NA/EU) down to ~$0.02 at high volume; ~$0.01 per 10k HTTPS requests; APAC and India 2–4x higher
- Google Cloud CDN / Azure CDN: roughly ~$0.08/GB NA/EU, scaling down with volume, plus request and cache-fill fees
The Hidden Costs That Wreck Your Estimate
The headline per-GB rate rarely matches the final invoice. Request charges are the first surprise: a media-heavy site serving millions of tiny files can spend more on requests than on bandwidth. Always multiply your request count by the per-request rate, not just your GB by the egress rate.
Origin egress is the second. With a hyperscaler CDN you may pay twice for the same byte — once for the CDN serving it, and again for your origin server (often inside AWS/GCP) shipping it to the CDN on a cache miss. A low cache-hit ratio quietly inflates this. TLS/SSL, dedicated certificates, real-time logs, WAF, image optimization, and DDoS mitigation are frequently add-ons, not included.
Region is the big multiplier. If 30% of your audience is in Asia-Pacific or South America, your blended per-GB cost can be double the NA/EU sticker price. And watch minimums and commitments: Fastly's ~$50/mo floor or enterprise annual commits can make a small project overpay versus a $1 BunnyCDN bill.
Worked Examples: What Real Sites Pay
Numbers beat adjectives. Assume NA/EU delivery and these three profiles, with rough monthly CDN cost:
A small business site (200 GB/mo, ~2M requests) is effectively free on Cloudflare's plan, a few dollars on BunnyCDN, and roughly $15–25 on CloudFront once requests are counted. For most brochure and marketing sites, a flat or free plan wins.
A growing SaaS or store (3 TB/mo, ~40M requests) runs about $200/mo on Cloudflare Business (flat), roughly $90–150 on BunnyCDN, and around $250–320 on CloudFront once egress and requests stack up. A high-traffic media or video site (50 TB/mo) is where volume discounts and flat pricing matter most — usage-based bills climb into four figures, while unmetered or steeply-tiered plans hold the line. The lesson: predictable, bandwidth-heavy traffic favors flat or volume pricing; spiky, low-volume traffic favors pay-as-you-go.
How to Pick Without Overpaying
Match the pricing model to your traffic shape. If your bandwidth is steady and substantial, a flat-rate or volume-tiered CDN protects you from bill shock. If your traffic is low or unpredictable, pay-as-you-go (with a generous free tier) keeps you from paying for capacity you don't use. If a large share of users sit in expensive regions, weight that into every quote before you sign.
Then optimize what you send. A high cache-hit ratio, long cache-control TTLs on static assets, modern image formats (WebP/AVIF), Brotli compression, and HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 all cut the GB and request counts the CDN bills you for — often shaving 30–60% off the meter regardless of provider. The cheapest CDN is partly the one you configure well.
Finally, prefer transparent, published pricing over 'contact sales.' You should be able to estimate your bill from your own GB and request numbers in five minutes. NordicVentures runs CDN on the same NVMe backbone as our hosting, with honest per-GB pricing, no surprise egress traps, and 24/7 human support to help you size it. See our CDN pricing and plug in your numbers before you commit.
FAQ
How much does a CDN cost per month?
It ranges from $0 to thousands depending on your traffic and provider. A small site (a few hundred GB/month) is often free on Cloudflare, a few dollars on BunnyCDN, or $15–25 on AWS CloudFront once requests are counted. A growing site at 3 TB/month typically runs $90–320/month depending on whether you pick flat-rate or usage-based pricing. High-volume media sites at 50 TB+ reach four figures, where volume discounts and flat plans matter most.
Is Cloudflare's free CDN really free?
For standard web assets — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images on a normal website — Cloudflare's free plan offers unmetered bandwidth with no per-GB charge, which is genuinely free for most sites. The limits are on features (advanced caching rules, image optimization, WAF, analytics) and on serving large amounts of non-HTML content like video, which their terms restrict to paid or specialized plans. For a typical business site or blog, free is real; for heavy video streaming, you'll need a metered or specialized CDN.
Why is CDN pricing higher for Asia and South America?
CDN providers pay more for bandwidth, transit, and data-center capacity in regions like Asia-Pacific, India, the Middle East, South America, and Australia, and they pass that through. The same gigabyte that costs ~$0.085 in North America or Europe can cost $0.12–0.25 or more in those regions on usage-based CDNs. If a meaningful share of your audience is there, weight your estimate upward — your blended per-GB cost can be double the NA/EU sticker price.
What's the difference between flat-rate and usage-based CDN pricing?
Flat-rate (or unmetered) pricing charges a fixed monthly fee regardless of how much you serve, so your bill is predictable — ideal for steady, bandwidth-heavy traffic. Usage-based pricing bills per GB and per request, so you pay exactly for what you use — efficient for low or unpredictable traffic, but a sudden spike or a misconfigured cache can produce a surprising invoice. Match the model to your traffic shape: flat for steady high volume, usage-based with a free tier for small or spiky workloads.
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