Pricing models

How CDN Vendors Price 2026 Verified: 5 Models, 12 Vendors, 3 Quote-Only

Knowing which pricing model a vendor uses changes everything about negotiation. The model is more predictive than the headline rate.

Verified 17 June 2026

Direct answer

Why do CDN vendors all price differently?

Because their cost structures are different. Per-GB metered vendors pass through their own backbone egress; plan-bundle vendors amortize a Free tier across paying customers; hyperscaler CDNs subsidize delivery to keep compute and storage sticky; quote-only vendors negotiate to maximize commitment.

Per-GB tiered

Fastly, AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, KeyCDN, Bunny. Rate drops as you cross tier thresholds. Best for predictable steady-state traffic; worst for spiky workloads that never reach the discount tier.

Plan bundle

Cloudflare ($0/$25/$250), CDN77 Growth ($990/250 TB), Vercel Pro ($20/user with 1 TB included). Best for predictability; risk is underutilisation raising the effective rate.

Hybrid plan + overage

Vercel Pro is plan + overage above 1 TB; CDN77 Growth is plan + per-TB overage; AWS Security Bundles cap at 50 TB with no overage at all. Effective rate inflects sharply at the cap.

Quote-only

Akamai, Edgio, Azure Front Door at volume. No public rate card. Forces a sales conversation with no anchor. Bring three competitor quotes or expect to pay rack.

Hyperscaler bundling

CloudFront and Cloud CDN are part of a wider AWS/GCP bill. Origin egress savings (free from S3 to CloudFront, free from GCS to Cloud CDN) can dwarf the CDN line for cloud-native apps.

What this means in practice

If traffic is predictable and growing, plan-bundle vendors hand you a multi-year cost ceiling.
If traffic is spiky, per-GB vendors are cheaper at the trough but expensive at peaks.
If you are AWS-native, the hyperscaler CDN almost always wins on TCO even if the per-GB rate looks high.
If you cannot accept a sales conversation, quote-only vendors are off the table by definition.

Last verified June 2026.