CDN pricing is rarely as simple as multiplying traffic by a single per-GB rate. With Amazon CloudFront, a monthly bill may include data transfer, HTTP or HTTPS requests, traffic sent back to the origin, cache invalidations, logs, edge functions, and optional features. CloudFront also offers both pay-as-you-go pricing and flat-rate plans, so the most economical option depends on where your users are located, how many requests they generate, your cache hit ratio, and the features your application needs.
Prices in this article were checked on July 30, 2026. All amounts are in US dollars and exclude taxes, exchange-rate differences, third-party origin costs, and charges for other AWS services. AWS and CloudFlew may change their pricing, so the checkout page, AWS console, and applicable service agreement remain the final sources of billing information.
What Makes Up the Total Cost of a CDN?
Data transfer out: The amount of data delivered from edge locations to viewers. Rates vary by viewer region and monthly usage tier.
HTTP and HTTPS requests: Usually billed per 10,000 requests. Websites serving small files, APIs, or image tiles can generate a high request count even when total traffic is moderate.
Data transfer back to the origin: Uploads, POST requests, and upstream WebSocket or gRPC traffic can create a separate charge.
Origin infrastructure: Servers, object storage, load balancers, databases, and other origin services may still incur charges even when the CDN reduces bandwidth use.
Cache invalidations: Frequently removing individual files from cache can create additional charges after the monthly free allowance.
Logging: Log delivery, storage, format conversion, and queries can all affect the total cost.
Edge computing: CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge have their own request and execution-related pricing dimensions.
Optional features: Origin Shield, dedicated IP custom SSL, and Anycast Static IPs may be billed separately or limited to certain plans.
Estimated monthly CDN cost = regional data transfer charges + request charges + upstream traffic + cache invalidations + logging and analytics + edge computing + optional features
For a flat-rate plan or prepaid traffic package, also consider the validity period, supported features, geographic coverage, request treatment, and the policy that applies when usage exceeds the stated allowance.
CloudFront Pricing Models in 2026
1. Pay-as-You-Go Pricing
CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing scales with actual usage and enabled features. AWS currently includes the following monthly free allowances for each AWS organization:
1TB of data transfer out to the internet
10 million HTTP or HTTPS requests
2 million CloudFront Functions invocations
2 million CloudFront KeyValueStore reads
After the free allowance, data transfer is priced by the viewer’s geographic region and the organization’s monthly usage tier. For the next 9TB, the published rate is $0.085 per GB in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Türkiye. The corresponding rate is $0.114 per GB in Japan and $0.120 per GB in a group that includes Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
HTTPS requests in the United States, Mexico, and Canada are priced at $0.0100 per 10,000 requests after the free allowance. The published HTTPS request rate for Europe and the Asia group listed above is $0.0120 per 10,000 requests.
The advantage of pay-as-you-go pricing is flexibility: customers pay for the traffic, requests, and features they use. The drawback is that costs may be difficult to predict when viewer locations, traffic levels, or request volumes change significantly.
2. CloudFront Flat-Rate Plans
As of July 30, 2026, AWS lists four standard CloudFront flat-rate plans:
Free: $0 per distribution per month, with a monthly usage allowance of 100GB and 1 million requests. It is intended for hobbyists, learners, and small projects.
Pro: $15 per distribution per month, with an allowance of 50TB and 10 million requests. It targets small websites, blogs, and applications.
Business: $200 per distribution per month, with an allowance of 50TB and 125 million requests. It includes more advanced security, caching, and application features.
Premium: $1,000 per distribution per month for the default allowance of 50TB and 500 million requests. Higher Premium usage levels are available at higher monthly prices.
These plans combine more than CDN traffic. Depending on the tier, they can cover CloudFront delivery, AWS WAF, DDoS protection, Route 53 DNS, TLS certificates, log ingestion, serverless edge computing, and S3 storage credits.
AWS describes the traffic and request figures as monthly usage allowances rather than hard limits. There are no overage charges, but sustained or unusually high use may affect traffic delivery performance. AWS may recommend an upgrade, and historical usage can affect eligibility for a plan or downgrade. Therefore, the Pro plan’s 50TB allowance should not be interpreted as an unconditional unlimited-traffic commitment.
Some configurations and features are also unavailable under flat-rate pricing. A customer that needs real-time access logs, complex edge behavior, Shield Advanced, or an unsupported multi-tenant configuration may need to remain on pay-as-you-go pricing.
3. Prepaid CDN Traffic Packages
A prepaid traffic package provides a fixed amount of CDN traffic for a defined validity period. This model may suit organizations with predictable demand that want to lock in part of their delivery budget.
On July 30, 2026, the CloudFlew homepage displayed the following annual CDN packages:
100GB: $0.80 for one year
10TB: $75 for one year
50TB: $350 for one year
100TB: $600 for one year
These figures reproduce only the package size, displayed price, and validity period shown publicly on the CloudFlew homepage on the review date. They should not be treated as directly equivalent to AWS pay-as-you-go rates. The public page does not fully explain every condition, such as the TB conversion method, eligible locations, request fees, overage treatment, refunds, or traffic sharing across domains. Terms displayed during checkout and in the service agreement apply.
CloudFront Cost Examples for 1TB, 10TB, and 100TB
The following examples demonstrate pay-as-you-go calculations for traffic delivered to viewers in the United States, Mexico, or Canada. They are not binding quotations from AWS or CloudFlew.
For consistency, the examples use 1TB = 1,000GB and assume that all requests use HTTPS. They exclude taxes, logging, cache invalidations, edge functions, optional features, and origin infrastructure.
Example 1: 1TB and 10 Million Requests per Month
Data transfer: 1TB, within the monthly free allowance = $0
HTTPS requests: 10 million, within the monthly free allowance = $0
Illustrative total: $0 per month
This does not mean the entire website operates at no cost. S3 storage, EC2 instances, load balancers, databases, log storage, support, and other services may still be billed.
Example 2: 10TB and 100 Million Requests per Month
Free data transfer: 1TB
Billable data transfer: 9TB × 1,000GB × $0.085 = $765
Free HTTPS requests: 10 million
Billable requests: 90 million ÷ 10,000 × $0.0100 = $90
Illustrative total: $765 + $90 = $855 per month
If viewers are mainly located in Japan, Australia, or another Asia-Pacific market, the calculation should use the applicable regional rate. Traffic distributed across multiple regions must be calculated separately and then combined.
Example 3: 100TB and 1 Billion Requests per Month
Using the published North American data transfer tiers:
First 1TB: free
Next 9TB: 9,000GB × $0.085 = $765
Next 40TB: 40,000GB × $0.080 = $3,200
Remaining 50TB: 50,000GB × $0.060 = $3,000
Data transfer subtotal: $6,965
Request charge: (1 billion − 10 million) ÷ 10,000 × $0.0100 = $990
Illustrative total: $6,965 + $990 = $7,955 per month
AWS also offers the one-year CloudFront Security Savings Bundle. Customers willing to commit to at least 10TB of monthly data transfer for 12 months or longer may be eligible for custom discounted pricing. Actual eligibility and discounts depend on the account and commercial agreement.
Common Reasons CDN Cost Estimates Are Wrong
Viewer Location Matters More Than Origin Location
Data transfer pricing is primarily based on the edge region that delivers content to the viewer. Hosting the origin in the United States does not mean traffic delivered to viewers in Japan will use the North American rate.
Request Volume and Object Size
Two websites can each deliver 1TB while generating very different request counts. A download site serving 10MB files may generate far fewer requests than an image or API service with an average response size of 50KB. The second workload may need to pay closer attention to requests, logs, and edge function invocations.
Cache Hit Ratio
A poor cache hit ratio increases origin requests and may increase compute, database, and non-AWS origin bandwidth costs. Content fetched by CloudFront from AWS origins such as S3, EC2, and Elastic Load Balancing generally does not incur an additional AWS-to-CloudFront data transfer fee, but the origin services themselves may still be charged.
Cache Invalidation Strategy
CloudFront includes the first 1,000 invalidation paths or tags each month. Additional invalidation paths or tags cost $0.005 each. A wildcard can cover many files, but indiscriminate use of /* can temporarily reduce the cache hit ratio. Versioned asset names, such as app.20260730.js, are often easier to roll back and reduce the need for invalidations.
Logs and Edge Computing
CloudFront does not charge an additional fee simply for enabling standard access logs, but the selected destination, storage, format conversion, and querying may incur charges. Real-time logs are billed by generated log lines. CloudFront Functions, Lambda@Edge, KeyValueStore, and Origin Shield each have separate pricing dimensions.
Pay-as-You-Go, Flat-Rate, or Prepaid Traffic?
Very small workload using the AWS free allowances: Evaluate CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing or the flat-rate Free plan.
CDN, WAF, DNS, and logs in a combined monthly plan: Evaluate a CloudFront flat-rate plan.
Real-time logs, advanced edge behavior, or unsupported flat-rate configurations: Pay-as-you-go pricing may be more suitable.
Stable traffic and a preference for prepaid costs: Compare CDN traffic packages and commitment discounts.
Complex geographic demand or highly variable monthly traffic: Model costs using real logs before selecting a plan.
Long-term traffic above 10TB per month: Compare commitment pricing, prepaid packages, and a custom agreement.
The most useful comparison is not the lowest advertised per-GB figure. Use 30 to 90 days of real traffic data, including regional delivery volume, HTTPS requests, average object size, cache hit ratio, traffic peaks, and required features.
How to Reduce CDN Costs Without Sacrificing Availability
Improve cacheability: Set appropriate
Cache-Controlheaders and avoid unnecessary cookies, headers, and query strings in the cache key. Never cache private user responses.Version static assets: Use file names such as
app.20260730.jsinstead of invalidating the entire distribution after every release.Optimize object sizes: Compress text and select suitable image and video formats while testing quality, compatibility, and processing overhead.
Evaluate CloudFront Price Classes: Excluding more expensive edge regions can reduce delivery costs, but users in excluded regions may experience higher latency.
Block unwanted traffic: Use WAF rules, rate limits, and access controls to reduce malicious requests without blocking legitimate users.
Configure budgets and anomaly alerts: Monitor data transfer, request counts, cache hit ratio, and origin costs instead of tracking only the total CDN bill.
Model a complete business cycle: Do not purchase a full year of capacity based solely on a single traffic spike.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a CDN Charged by Traffic or Bandwidth?
Both models exist. CloudFront primarily offers data transfer and request-based billing as well as flat-rate plans. Other CDN providers may use peak bandwidth, 95th-percentile bandwidth, or prepaid traffic packages.
Does CloudFront Include 1TB Free Every Month?
The AWS pay-as-you-go pricing page currently includes 1TB of internet data transfer and 10 million HTTP or HTTPS requests each month for every AWS organization. Under consolidated billing, each member account does not receive a separate allowance. Other services and optional features are not necessarily included.
Why Can’t I Multiply 10TB by One Per-GB Rate?
CloudFront applies a free allowance, regional prices, and usage tiers. Traffic in multiple regions must be calculated separately, while requests, logging, and optional features may need to be added independently.
What Happens When a Flat-Rate Plan Exceeds Its Allowance?
AWS describes the stated figures as usage allowances rather than hard limits and does not charge overage fees. However, sustained and substantial use above the allowance may lead to delivery adjustments, and AWS may recommend moving to a higher tier.
What Should I Check Before Buying a Prepaid CDN Package?
Review the validity period, unit conversion, eligible edge locations, request and feature charges, overage rules, domain-sharing policy, refunds, and support scope. Dividing the package price by its traffic allowance does not reveal every restriction.
Does a CDN Eliminate Origin Costs?
No. A CDN reduces repeated origin fetches, but origin storage, compute, databases, load balancers, and uncacheable requests may still incur costs.
Conclusion
An accurate CDN estimate should account for viewer regions, request volume, cache hit ratio, logging, and required features. Small workloads can begin by evaluating CloudFront’s free allowances. Applications that want bundled security and more predictable monthly billing can compare flat-rate plans. Businesses with stable traffic can also consider prepaid traffic packages or commitment-based discounts.
CloudFlew provides AWS CloudFront-based CDN services and annual traffic packages. Review your recent regional traffic, request count, and cache hit ratio, then visit the CloudFlew CDN product page to view the currently displayed packages. Conditions not shown on the public page are governed by the checkout page and applicable service agreement.
References
AWS: Amazon CloudFront Pay-as-You-Go Pricing, reviewed July 30, 2026
AWS: Amazon CloudFront Pricing and Flat-Rate Plans, reviewed July 30, 2026
AWS CloudFront Developer Guide: Flat-Rate Pricing Plans, reviewed July 30, 2026
AWS CloudFront Developer Guide: Paying for File Invalidation, reviewed July 30, 2026
CloudFlew: CDN Traffic Packages, reviewed July 30, 2026
