The bill nobody models before launch
Every founder budgets hosting. Almost nobody budgets delivery. A site serving 5 terabytes a month pays nothing like a site serving 500 gigabytes, and the vendor you pick decides whether that growth shows up as a flat subscription, a per-gigabyte meter, or a negotiated contract you did not see coming. The three vendors here price the same gigabyte three different ways: Cloudflare sells the plan, Fastly sells the gigabyte by region, and Amazon CloudFront sells the gigabyte on a declining tier ladder plus a per-request meter.
That difference is the whole decision. At low volume the flat plan wins by a wide margin. At high volume the tier ladder wins back the gap. In the middle, the request meter and the region mix decide. This guide runs all three price lists against the same three traffic profiles, with the vendors' own published figures, so the choice is arithmetic instead of brand preference.
> [!KEY TAKEAWAY]
> Cloudflare charges for the plan, Fastly charges per gigabyte by region, and CloudFront charges per gigabyte on a declining tier ladder plus per-request fees. Below roughly 2.3 terabytes a month of North America and Europe traffic, CloudFront's bandwidth alone costs more than Cloudflare Business at $200 a month; above that, the tier ladder and the flat plan trade places, and Fastly's published table stops at 20 terabytes, where negotiation replaces list price.
Who this guide is for, and who should stop here
This guide is for operators choosing a content delivery network for a production website, application, or media property: founders, engineering leads, and finance owners who will actually pay the invoice. It is written around list prices published by the vendors in November 2026, not around a sales quote, and every figure below is a list price that a volume agreement can beat.
Stop here and get a quote instead if you serve more than 20 terabytes a month, run a mission-critical property that needs a contractual service level agreement, or need committed-use discounts on CloudFront. List-price math tells you which vendor to negotiate with; it does not replace the negotiation. If your traffic sits in one region, run that region's column, because Fastly's Africa rate is more than double its North America rate.
The three price lists, side by side
Cloudflare's plans page lists CDN on every tier: Free at $0 a month, Pro at $20 a month billed annually or $25 billed monthly, Business at $200 a month billed annually or $250 billed monthly, and Contract at a custom price billed annually. The page describes Free as being for personal or hobby projects that are not business-critical, and Pro as being for professional websites that are not business-critical. There is no per-gigabyte row on the plans page: the plan is the price, and the feature table, not a meter, separates the tiers.
Fastly's Full Site Delivery page gives the first 100 GB free each month, then bills per gigabyte per region per month: for 100 GB to 10 TB, North America and Europe cost $0.12 per GB, Asia and Australia cost $0.19, Mexico costs $0.16, Saudi Arabia and South America cost $0.19, and Africa, India, and South Korea cost $0.28. For the next 10 TB, the rates fall to $0.08 for North America and Europe, $0.14 for Asia, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and South America, $0.12 for Mexico, and $0.24 for Africa, India, and South Korea. Beyond 20 TB the page directs the reader to contact Fastly for high-volume pricing, which is the boundary of its list price.
CloudFront's price list, published by Amazon Web Services on October 19, 2026, prices data transfer out of the United States and Europe at $0.085 per GB for the first 10 TB a month, $0.080 for the next 40 TB, $0.060 for the next 100 TB, $0.040 for the next 350 TB, $0.030 for the next 524 TB, $0.025 for the next 4 PB, and $0.020 beyond 5 PB. Asia Pacific transfer starts at $0.120 per GB, Japan at $0.114, the Middle East at $0.110, India at $0.109, and Canada at $0.085. Requests in the United States cost $0.0075 per 10,000 HTTP requests and $0.01 per 10,000 HTTPS requests.
| Attribute | Cloudflare | Fastly | Amazon CloudFront | Authority |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Pricing unit | Flat monthly plan | Per GB by region | Per GB on a tier ladder, plus per request | Vendor pricing pages, November 2026 |
| Entry price | $0 Free; $20 Pro billed annually | 100 GB free, then $0.12 per GB in North America and Europe | No monthly fee; $0.085 per GB first 10 TB in the United States and Europe | Cloudflare plans; Fastly pricing; AWS Price List, October 19, 2026 |
| Request meter | None on the plans page | First 1 million free, then $0.01 per 10,000 requests | $0.01 per 10,000 HTTPS requests in the United States | Fastly pricing; AWS Price List |
| Published ceiling | Contract tier, custom | 20 TB, then negotiated pricing | Full tier ladder to beyond 5 PB | Vendor pricing pages |
| Region spread | One plan price worldwide | $0.12 to $0.28 per GB across regions at the same tier | $0.085 to $0.120 per GB across regions at the first tier | Fastly pricing; AWS Price List |
Worked math: the same traffic on all three meters
One formula for the metered vendors and one for the flat vendor keeps the comparison honest across profiles:
$
\text{Monthly CDN Cost} = (\text{Billable GB} \times \text{Per-GB Rate}) + (\text{Billable Requests} \div 10{,}000 \times \text{Request Rate})
$
$
\text{Cloudflare Monthly Cost} = \text{Plan Price}
$
Profile A is a small marketing site: 500 GB a month, all in North America and Europe, 2 million HTTPS requests. CloudFront charges 500 times $0.085, which is $42.50, plus $2.00 in request fees, for $44.50. Fastly charges nothing for the first 100 GB, then 400 times $0.12, which is $48.00, plus $1.00 in request fees, for $49.00. Cloudflare Free charges $0, because CDN is listed on the Free tier, but the plans page positions Free for projects that are not business-critical, so a production site should compare against Pro at $20 a month billed annually. At this volume the flat plan is less than half the metered price.
Profile B is a growing media property: 5 TB a month, all in North America and Europe, 20 million HTTPS requests. CloudFront charges 5,000 times $0.085, which is $425.00, plus $20.00 in request fees, for $445.00. Fastly charges 4,900 billable gigabytes times $0.12, which is $588.00, plus $19.00 in request fees, for $607.00. Cloudflare Pro still charges $20 a month billed annually, and Business charges $200 a month billed annually. The flat plan is an order of magnitude cheaper here, because neither metered vendor's list price was designed to compete with an unmetered plan at this volume.
Profile C is a large video property: 50 TB a month, all in North America and Europe, 200 million HTTPS requests. CloudFront charges 10,000 times $0.085, which is $850.00, plus 40,000 times $0.080, which is $3,200.00, for $4,050.00 in bandwidth, plus $200.00 in request fees, for $4,250.00. Fastly's published table does not reach 50 TB: it totals $2,007.20 for the first 20 TB, and then the page says to contact Fastly for high-volume pricing. Any Fastly figure for 50 TB is a negotiation, not a list price, and this guide refuses to invent one. Cloudflare's flat plans still read $20 and $200 a month, which is why high-volume properties on flat plans are either on Contract terms or on feature tiers the public page does not price.
The break-even point between Cloudflare Business and CloudFront bandwidth alone is instructive:
$
\text{Break-Even GB} = \$200 \div \$0.085 = 2{,}353 \text{ GB per month}
$
Above about 2.3 TB a month of United States and Europe traffic, CloudFront's bandwidth meter alone passes the Business plan price, before a single request fee. That does not make Business the right buy at 3 TB, because the plans differ in features, support, and terms the price row does not capture. It does tell you where the flat plan becomes the number to beat in a negotiation with the metered vendors.
The request meter is the second bill
Bandwidth dominates the headlines, but requests decide close calls. CloudFront's United States HTTPS rate of $0.01 per 10,000 requests looks trivial until an API-heavy property serves hundreds of millions of small responses: 200 million HTTPS requests cost $200.00 on CloudFront, and 199 million billable requests after Fastly's free million cost $199.00 at the same rate. The request meter rarely picks a winner between the metered vendors; it punishes small-object, high-request architectures on both.
The practical consequence is a design rule, not a vendor rule. A property serving millions of tiny API responses through a CDN pays a request tax that a property serving the same bytes as large media files does not. If your request count is high relative to your bytes, consolidate, cache at the edge with the stale-while-revalidate pattern covered in the CDN stale-while-revalidate and edge purge architecture guide, and measure requests per gigabyte before signing. Storefronts pay a second meter on top of delivery: the Shopify versus WooCommerce versus BigCommerce fee guide prices the platform, transaction, and hosting lines at identical monthly volumes. For the compute layer behind the cache, see the Cloudflare Workers versus Vercel edge functions guide, and to budget the origin fleet the cache protects, run the website cost calculator.
Where each price breaks
Cloudflare's flat price breaks on scope, not on volume. The features that matter to a business property, such as support response, service level terms, and advanced firewall rules, sit on higher tiers or on Contract. A founder who buys Pro because the price row says $20 and then needs enterprise terms has bought the wrong tier. Read the feature table before the price row, and treat Contract as the real price for a mission-critical property.
Fastly's list price breaks at 20 TB, where the published table ends and negotiation begins. That is a signal that Fastly prices high volume by contract. A property forecasting growth past 20 TB should open the negotiation before it crosses the line, because the rate will depend on commit, region mix, and term, none of which appear on the public page.
CloudFront's list price breaks on complexity, not on ceiling. The tier ladder runs past 5 PB, so there is no published cliff, but the invoice combines bandwidth tiers, request tiers, regional rates, and origin services such as Origin Shield, each with its own meter. A team that models only the $0.085 first tier will understate the bill at 50 TB by missing the request fees, and will overstate it by missing the declining tiers. Model the full ladder, region by region, or the estimate is decoration.
> [!WARNING]
> Never compare a flat plan price to a metered price at one traffic point and call the decision made. A flat plan that wins at 500 GB and at 5 TB can still lose on features, support, or contract terms, and a metered price that loses at 5 TB can still win under a negotiated commit at 50 TB. Re-run the three profiles at your own region mix every quarter, because region mix moves Fastly's bill by more than double between North America and Africa at the same volume.
Decision matrix and execution checklist
| Situation | Buy | Why the math says so | Authority |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Under 500 GB, production site | Cloudflare Pro | $20 a month billed annually beats $44.50 and $49.00 metered totals | Cloudflare plans; AWS Price List; Fastly pricing |
| 5 TB, North America and Europe | Cloudflare Pro or Business, on features | Flat $20 to $200 against $445 and $607 metered totals | Same three sources |
| 50 TB, United States and Europe | Negotiate CloudFront or Fastly, or Cloudflare Contract | CloudFront list is $4,250; Fastly list stops at 20 TB | AWS Price List; Fastly pricing |
| Africa-heavy audience | Model Fastly separately | $0.28 per GB is more than double the $0.12 North America rate | Fastly pricing |
| High request count, low bytes | Any vendor, after a caching pass | Request fees reach $200 per 200 million requests on both metered vendors | AWS Price List; Fastly pricing |
> [!FOUNDER]
> "Founders compare CDN prices the way they compare rent: by the headline number. The headline is the least important number on the page. What matters is the meter behind it, the region your audience lives in, and the point where the published price stops and a human being starts. Price the meter, price your mix, and negotiate before the invoice teaches you."
> — Enow A. Jovial, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Operator boundaries: who should not pick each vendor
Do not pick Cloudflare Free for a business-critical property — Free is positioned for projects that are not business-critical. Do not pick Fastly past 20 TB on list price: there is none, and any budget built on an extrapolated rate is fiction. Do not pick CloudFront by its $0.085 first tier alone, because the invoice at volume is a blend of declining tiers plus request fees. Do not pick any vendor on bandwidth alone if your request count is high — the request meter is a second bill that bandwidth-only math hides.
> [!TIP]
> Price the negotiation, not just the list. Before signing a metered CDN, ask for the rate at double your current volume in writing. A vendor that will quote the next tier has given you the only number that matters for next year's budget.
The storage layer behind the delivery is priced in our Cloudflare R2 vs AWS S3 vs Backblaze B2 object storage pricing guide, which names the 3.8-times egress ratio where the winner changes.