CDN cost calculator
Pricing verified April 29, 2026. Volume tiers and free allowances are applied where published. Per-region rates and committed-use discounts vary — figures here are best-effort estimates, not quotes.
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$714/ month
$8,568 a year · 15.6× cheaper
Bandwidth-only comparison. Request fees, cache-fill, and regional surcharges (often 1.5–3× higher in APAC, LATAM, ME, and Africa) are not included — and would widen the gap further. ZeroBuffer pricing starts at $0.0049/GB and decreases with volume — flat across every region.
What actually drives a CDN bill
Three things, in order of impact. Volume tiers mean your marginal rate falls as you grow, so a headline price quoted at the first tier rarely describes what you pay at scale. Regional multipliers mean the same gigabyte costs different amounts depending on where it is delivered — the single largest source of surprise on a global audience. And cache hit ratio decides how much traffic is billed twice, once as origin egress filling the cache and again as edge egress to the user.
The third is the one you control directly. If you do not know your current ratio, the cache header checker will read it off a real URL, along with whatever is stopping the response from being cached in the first place.
Reading the comparison honestly
Egress is modelled here and nothing else. Per-request fees, origin storage, image transformation, log delivery, and WAF add-ons are all billed separately on every platform and are excluded deliberately — mixing them in would make the comparison less interpretable, not more complete. Where a provider publishes no public rate, the figure shown is an estimate and is labelled as one on the card.
For the underlying cost mechanics, our deep dives on AWS data transfer cost, S3 egress costs, and Amazon CDN cost go further than a calculator can.
Frequently asked questions
- How is CDN bandwidth usually billed?
- Almost always per gigabyte of egress — data leaving the edge towards your users — measured monthly and charged in descending volume tiers. Two things vary between providers and account for most of the difference in a bill: whether the per-GB rate changes by region, and whether requests are charged separately from bandwidth on top of it.
- Why do CDN prices differ so much by region?
- Most large clouds apply a regional multiplier to the same gigabyte depending on where it is served, so delivery in South America, India, or the Middle East can cost between 1.5 and 3 times what the identical traffic costs in North America or Europe. If your audience sits outside North America and Europe, a headline per-GB rate quoted for those regions will understate your real bill substantially.
- What is a good cache hit ratio, and how does it change the cost?
- Above 90% is healthy for static assets and above 95% is achievable for immutable, content-hashed files. Hit ratio matters to cost because a miss is billed twice: once as origin egress to fill the cache and again as edge egress to the user. Raising the ratio from 80% to 95% cuts origin fetches by three quarters, and origin egress from a cloud provider is usually the more expensive of the two.
- Are these competitor prices exact?
- They are list prices taken from each provider's public pricing page and are marked with the date they were verified. Two caveats apply: Akamai and enterprise CDN77 tiers publish no public rates, so those figures are estimates and labelled as such, and negotiated contracts at volume routinely differ from list. Treat the result as a well-grounded comparison, not a quotation.
- Does the calculator include request fees or storage?
- No — it models egress bandwidth only, because that is the dominant line item for media and download-heavy workloads. Providers that charge separately per 10,000 requests will add to the figures shown, and origin storage is billed independently of delivery on every platform.