Hidden costs

Hidden CDN Costs 2026 Verified: Request Fees, Origin Egress, WAF, Premium Routing

The headline per-GB rate is only part of a CDN bill. Six other line items can double or triple it. Here is each one, who charges it, and what to ask before signing.

Verified 17 June 2026

Direct answer

What is missing from the CDN per-GB rate?

Per-request fees (CloudFront $0.012 per 10k, Cloud CDN $0.0075), origin egress to a third-party CDN ($0.05-$0.09/GB at AWS/GCP), WAF + Bot Management add-ons (only Cloudflare bundles them), cache-miss penalties (Cloud CDN double-charges), image optimization (Fastly, Cloudflare, Bunny all meter), and premium routing (Argo, Global Accelerator). Combined they routinely add 30-60% to a naive per-GB estimate.

1. Per-request fees

Fastly, AWS CloudFront and Google Cloud CDN bill HTTP/HTTPS requests separately. Cloudflare and Bunny do not. At low traffic this is a rounding error; at API-heavy scale (millions of small JSON responses) it can rival bandwidth.

AWS CloudFront: $0.012 per 10,000 HTTPS requests (HTTP slightly less).
Google Cloud CDN: $0.0075 per 10,000 cache lookups.
Fastly: $0.0075 per 10,000 requests in NA/EU.
Cloudflare, Bunny, KeyCDN: $0 (bundled).

2. Origin egress

Pulling data from S3 or GCS to a non-AWS/GCP CDN incurs origin egress at $0.05-$0.09/GB. CloudFront waives origin egress from AWS sources; Cloud CDN waives it from GCS. Mixed-vendor architectures pay this twice.

3. Cache-miss penalties

Cloud CDN charges both cache-fill (origin to edge) and cache-egress (edge to client) on misses. A 50% hit ratio effectively doubles your effective rate. Fastly and CloudFront are kinder; Cloudflare bundles cache fill into the plan.

4. Security and feature add-ons

WAF: Cloudflare bundles WAF into Pro ($25/mo) and above. AWS WAF is $5/mo per Web ACL plus $1 per rule plus $0.60 per million requests. Akamai bundles into enterprise quotes.
Bot Management: priced separately on most vendors (Cloudflare $5/M req add-on at Pro; CloudFront Bot Control $1 per million requests; Akamai quote).
Image Optimization: Cloudflare Polish ($5/M images on Pro), Fastly Image Optimizer, Bunny Optimizer ($9.50/mo flat). Per-image fees stack.
API Security / Schema Validation: Cloudflare API Shield is an Enterprise add-on; AWS WAF rules apply; Fastly has Signal Sciences (now Fastly Next-Gen WAF) at quote.

5. Premium routing

Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing is $5/mo + $0.10/GB on Pro and above. AWS Global Accelerator is $0.025/hour + $0.015-$0.105/GB transferred. Akamai SureRoute is bundled into enterprise. None show on the standard rate sheet.

6. Commitment and minimum spend

Enterprise CDN contracts almost always have a monthly minimum (commonly $5k-$50k/month) plus 12-36 month terms. Quote-only vendors will not give you the rate until you indicate volume. See our RFP template for language that forces a written commitment-free floor rate.

Sanity check

If your invoice is more than 2x your calculator estimate, you have probably hit add-on fees, region premium, or cache-miss double-billing. Audit before you renew.

Last verified June 2026.