CDN Pricing Comparison 2026: 12 Providers Benchmarked by Cost per GB

A single penny per gigabyte sounds trivial until you multiply it by 500 TB of monthly egress. At that volume, the spread between the cheapest and most expensive CDN on this list is over $25,000 per month — $300,000 per year of margin evaporating into transfer fees. This CDN pricing comparison benchmarks 12 providers as of Q2 2026, normalizing their published and negotiated rates across five traffic tiers, three delivery regions, and two workload profiles. You will get a pricing table, a methodology disclosure, and a workload-profile decision matrix you can hand directly to procurement or plug into your own TCO model.

CDN Pricing Comparison Methodology for 2026

Every CDN provider structures pricing differently — commit-based tiers, bandwidth percentile billing (95th or 99th), request-based surcharges, regional multipliers, origin-shield add-ons. Direct apples-to-apples comparison is intentionally difficult. Here is how we normalized.

Data sources: Public pricing pages scraped April 2026, supplemented by contract quotes shared (anonymized) by three mid-market SaaS companies and one video platform each doing 50–200 TB/month. Where providers publish only "contact us," we used the median of available contract data points.

Normalization dimensions:

• Traffic tiers: 1 TB, 10 TB, 100 TB, 500 TB, and 1 PB per month.
• Regions: North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The table below shows blended global rates; regional deltas are called out where they exceed 30%.
• Workload profiles: Static asset delivery (large objects, high cache-hit ratio) and dynamic/API-heavy delivery (low cache-hit ratio, high request count). Most published rates assume the first profile. We flag where request-based charges materially change the effective $/GB for the second.

We did not include free-tier allowances. A CDN's free 1 TB offer is irrelevant to anyone reading a benchmark at these volumes.

12-Provider CDN Cost per GB Benchmark — Q2 2026

Ranges reflect regional variance and negotiated vs. list pricing. BlazingCDN and BunnyCDN rates are published list; hyperscaler rates assume standard pricing without private agreements. All data as of April 2026.

What Changed in CDN Bandwidth Pricing in 2026

Three structural shifts reshaped CDN cost comparison since 2025.

Hyperscaler egress pressure is real. AWS reduced CloudFront pricing by roughly 10–15% for committed-use plans introduced in late 2025, but the base pay-as-you-go rates barely moved. Google Cloud CDN's premium tier (using Google's backbone) now carries a separate surcharge that pushes effective costs 20–30% above its standard tier for APAC delivery. Azure's CDN landscape fragmented further after the Edgio acquisition, and pricing clarity has not improved.

Request-based charges matter more than ever. As API traffic and small-object workloads grow, providers charging per-10K-request fees (CloudFront at $0.0075–$0.016 per 10K HTTPS requests, for example) add a non-trivial layer on top of bandwidth cost. At 100 TB of API responses averaging 5 KB each, you are looking at roughly 20 billion requests — an additional $15,000–$32,000/month on CloudFront that never shows up in a $/GB comparison.

Usage-based pricing won the model war. Commit-and-overage contracts still dominate enterprise deals, but the overage penalty spread has narrowed. Providers like CDN77 and KeyCDN now publish transparent per-GB rates with no minimum. BunnyCDN's flat regional pricing remains unchanged since 2024. The trend rewards operators who right-size commits monthly rather than annually.

Workload-Profile Decision Matrix: Best CDN for Your Traffic Shape

Price per GB is necessary but insufficient. The right CDN depends on your traffic shape, your origin topology, and where your users sit. This matrix maps five common workload profiles to the providers that score best on effective cost and architectural fit as of Q2 2026.

For high-bandwidth static delivery — video, software updates, game patches — the cost gap is stark. BlazingCDN serves 500 TB at $0.003/GB ($1,500/month), delivering stability and fault tolerance comparable to CloudFront while costing roughly 85–90% less at the same volume. Enterprise clients including Sony use BlazingCDN for this exact profile: predictable, high-volume egress where per-GB economics dominate the budget. Pricing scales further to $0.002/GB at 2 PB. Full tier details are on BlazingCDN's pricing page.

Hidden Costs That Break a CDN Price Benchmark

The table above captures bandwidth cost. It does not capture five line items that regularly inflate the real bill by 15–40%:

• Origin shield / mid-tier caching: CloudFront charges separately for origin shield ($0.0060/10K requests). Akamai bundles it into SureRoute but requires a higher-tier contract.
• HTTPS request surcharges: CloudFront and Google Cloud CDN add per-request fees that compound on small-object workloads. Providers like BunnyCDN, CDN77, and BlazingCDN include HTTPS requests in the per-GB rate.
• Real-time log streaming: Fastly includes real-time logs; CloudFront charges for Kinesis Data Firehose delivery. At 100 TB/month, log delivery alone can run $500–$2,000/month on AWS.
• Invalidation and purge fees: CloudFront gives 1,000 free invalidation paths/month; after that, $0.005 per path. Fastly and Cloudflare offer instant purge at no per-purge cost.
• Egress to origin: If your origin is not in the same cloud, cache-fill egress is billed at standard cloud egress rates — $0.05–$0.09/GB from AWS depending on region. This is not a CDN fee, but it is CDN-adjacent and frequently overlooked in TCO modeling.

How to Build Your Own CDN Cost Model

Pull three months of production traffic data from your current provider. You need: total GB delivered per region per month, total request count (split HTTP/HTTPS), cache-hit ratio at the edge, and peak bandwidth in Gbps (for providers using 95th-percentile billing). Multiply each provider's published rate by your actual regional traffic mix, then add the hidden costs above. The delta between the cheapest and most expensive option is almost always larger than you expect, and it grows superlinearly with volume.

FAQ

How much does a CDN cost per GB in 2026?

As of Q2 2026, published CDN pricing ranges from $0.002/GB (BlazingCDN at 2 PB commitment) to $0.085/GB (CloudFront pay-as-you-go in APAC). Most mid-market deals land between $0.01 and $0.04/GB after negotiation. The effective rate depends heavily on region, request count, and commit structure.

Which CDN provider is cheapest per GB for high bandwidth traffic?

For static delivery workloads above 100 TB/month, BlazingCDN and BunnyCDN consistently benchmark lowest on per-GB cost. BlazingCDN's published rate at 500 TB is $0.003/GB; BunnyCDN's is approximately $0.005–$0.01/GB depending on region. Both include HTTPS requests in the base rate, which eliminates a cost layer that inflates hyperscaler bills.

Is CDN pricing comparison different for API and dynamic content?

Yes. Per-request fees and low cache-hit ratios change the math. A workload averaging 5 KB per response at 100 TB/month generates roughly 20 billion requests. On CloudFront, per-request charges alone add $15,000–$32,000/month. Providers that do not charge per-request (Cloudflare on enterprise plans, Fastly on commit) become comparatively cheaper for this profile even if their per-GB rate is higher.

Should I use 95th-percentile or GB-transferred billing?

95th-percentile billing favors workloads with sharp, short-lived spikes (game launches, breaking news) because sustained bandwidth determines the bill, not total bytes. GB-transferred billing favors steady-state, high-volume delivery (video streaming, software updates) because you pay exactly for what you ship. Know your traffic shape before signing a contract.

How often do CDN providers change pricing?

Hyperscalers (AWS, Google, Azure) typically adjust CDN pricing once or twice per year, often tied to cloud-wide pricing events. Independent CDNs update less predictably. BunnyCDN and KeyCDN have held rates stable since 2024. Akamai and Fastly adjust primarily through contract negotiation rather than list-price changes.

Run Your Own Benchmark This Week

Export your last 90 days of edge logs. Calculate your actual per-region, per-protocol traffic split. Feed those numbers into each provider's pricing calculator — or their sales desk for commit-based quotes. Compare the all-in monthly cost (bandwidth + requests + origin shield + logs + purge), not just the headline $/GB. If the spread between your current provider and the cheapest viable alternative exceeds 20%, you have a conversation worth having with your finance team before the next renewal lands.