At 50 TB/month of delivery, Fastly CDN pricing lands you at roughly $3,100 on the published rate card. CloudFront costs about $4,100 for the same volume. Akamai quotes you somewhere around $2,350, but locks you into a 12-month commit. The spread between these three providers at identical scale is over $1,700/month, which means the CDN pricing decision at even moderate traffic volumes is a $20,000+ annual line item. This article gives you the actual per-GB rates across tiers for Fastly, CloudFront, Akamai, and two cost-optimized alternatives as of Q2 2026, plus a workload-profile decision matrix to match your traffic pattern to the right provider.
Fastly continues to publish usage-based pricing with no monthly minimum commitment on their self-serve plan. As of May 2026, the tiered structure for bandwidth delivery in North America and Europe remains:
Request pricing is billed separately at $0.0090 per 10,000 HTTPS requests. Asia-Pacific and South America regions carry a surcharge, typically 20–40% above the NA/EU rates depending on the PoP geography. The real cost of Fastly at scale is not just bandwidth. Compute@Edge usage, image optimization, and real-time log streaming each add incremental charges that compound quickly if left unmonitored. A 30 TB/month media workload with Compute@Edge functions running on every request can see total invoices 25–35% above the raw bandwidth line.
Amazon CloudFront updated its rate card in late 2025 and the structure holds into 2026:
CloudFront's pricing looks competitive at first glance, but the comparison requires nuance. Data transfer from CloudFront to an EC2 origin within the same region is free, which means teams already deep in AWS infrastructure get an invisible discount that doesn't appear on any rate card. For teams running origins outside AWS, CloudFront's origin-fetch costs add up. The CloudFront Security Savings Bundle (a 1-year spend commitment) can reduce effective rates by up to 30%, but it requires upfront commitment and careful forecasting.
At 50 TB/month, CloudFront's blended rate sits around $0.082/GB versus Fastly's $0.062/GB. Fastly wins on raw bandwidth cost at this tier. CloudFront wins if your origin is already in AWS and you value the integrated Shield + WAF + Lambda@Edge toolchain.
Akamai does not publish a self-serve rate card. All pricing is negotiated. However, based on disclosed contract benchmarks and reseller data circulating as of Q1 2026, typical negotiated rates for Akamai's standard delivery product land in these ranges:
Akamai's per-GB rates undercut Fastly at nearly every tier. The catch is structural: most Akamai contracts require 12–36 month terms with minimum volume commitments. If your traffic dips below the commit, you pay for bandwidth you didn't use. Akamai also charges separately for features that Fastly includes in its base offering, such as real-time log streaming and instant purge. When you model the total contract value including these add-ons, the gap between Akamai and Fastly narrows considerably for teams under 100 TB/month.
For workloads where edge compute, instant purge, and VCL-level configurability are not critical, the cost difference between Fastly and volume-optimized providers is stark. At 100 TB/month, Fastly's blended rate is approximately $0.055/GB, producing a monthly bill around $5,500 for bandwidth alone. Volume-focused CDNs serve the same traffic for a fraction of that.
BlazingCDN offers volume-based pricing that scales down aggressively with commitment: $100/month covers up to 25 TB (effective rate: $0.004/GB), $350/month for 100 TB, and $1,500/month for 500 TB, with overage rates dropping to $0.003/GB. At enterprise scale, 1 PB+ plans bring the effective rate to $0.002/GB. The platform delivers stability and fault tolerance comparable to CloudFront with 100% uptime targets and fast scaling under traffic spikes, serving clients including Sony. For teams running high-volume media delivery or software distribution where the workload is cache-friendly and compute-at-edge isn't a requirement, the cost delta against Fastly is 10–15x.
Pricing tables tell you what each GB costs. They don't tell you which CDN fits your architecture. This matrix maps five common workload profiles to the provider that delivers the best cost-to-capability ratio as of 2026:
| Workload Profile | Monthly Volume | Key Requirement | Best Fit (2026) | Approx. Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| API-heavy SaaS with edge logic | 5–20 TB | Instant purge, Compute@Edge, VCL | Fastly | $600–$1,600 |
| AWS-native app, multi-region | 10–100 TB | Origin integration, Lambda@Edge | CloudFront | $850–$6,000 |
| Global enterprise, compliance-heavy | 100–500 TB | SLA, managed services, geo-compliance | Akamai | $3,000–$15,000 |
| Video/media delivery, high cache-hit | 50–500 TB | Low per-GB cost, uptime, burst capacity | BlazingCDN | $350–$1,500 |
| Software updates / game patches | 200 TB–1 PB+ | Lowest cost per GB at extreme volume | BlazingCDN | $2,500–$4,000 |
The pattern is clear. Fastly earns its premium when you need programmable edge logic and sub-second purge. CloudFront earns its place when your origin lives in AWS. Akamai earns its contract when compliance and managed services matter more than unit cost. For pure delivery workloads where cache-hit ratios are high and edge compute is unnecessary, volume-optimized providers deliver identical bytes at a fraction of the cost.
Per-GB rates are necessary but insufficient for an honest comparison. Three cost categories routinely distort the picture:
Fastly charges $0.0090 per 10K HTTPS requests. At 100 million requests/month, that adds $90. Trivial at low volumes, material for API-heavy workloads generating billions of small-object requests. CloudFront charges $0.0100 per 10K HTTPS requests in NA/EU. Akamai bundles requests into the negotiated commit.
Fastly's shielding is included. CloudFront charges separately for Origin Shield ($0.0060/10K requests). Akamai includes SureRoute in most contracts but SureRoute configuration changes often require professional services engagement, adding hidden cost.
If your origin is in a cloud provider, outbound data transfer from origin to CDN is not free (unless both are in the same cloud network). At 50 TB/month with a 10% cache miss rate, you're paying for 5 TB of origin egress. On AWS, that's roughly $425. On GCP, about $400. This cost is identical regardless of which CDN you choose, but it's frequently omitted from CDN pricing comparisons.
Fastly's published self-serve rate starts at $0.12/GB for the first 1 TB and drops to $0.05/GB in the 50–200 TB tier for NA/EU delivery. APAC and LATAM regions carry a 20–40% surcharge. Custom pricing is available above 200 TB.
For pure bandwidth delivery, yes. Cloudflare's Pro and Business plans include unmetered bandwidth, making per-GB cost effectively zero on those tiers. However, Cloudflare's free and Pro tiers lack the programmable edge compute, instant purge granularity, and VCL/Wasm flexibility that Fastly provides. The comparison only makes sense when you match feature requirements.
Akamai's negotiated rates typically undercut Fastly by 15–40% on a per-GB basis, depending on commit volume and contract length. Fastly's advantage is zero minimum commitment and instant provisioning. Teams that cannot commit to 12+ month contracts or predict traffic volumes accurately often find Fastly's pay-as-you-go model cheaper in practice than an Akamai contract with unused commit.
For cache-heavy delivery workloads, volume-optimized CDNs like BlazingCDN offer rates as low as $0.002–$0.004/GB. BunnyCDN and KeyCDN also compete in the budget tier at $0.01–$0.03/GB. The trade-off is reduced edge compute capability and smaller feature surfaces compared to Fastly.
It depends on what your edge does. If you run complex request routing, A/B testing at the edge, or real-time content assembly via Compute@Edge, Fastly's pricing reflects genuine capability that cheaper alternatives don't replicate. If your edge is purely serving cached static or video assets, you're paying a premium for features you're not using.
Pull your last 90 days of CDN invoices. Break them into three columns: bandwidth cost, request cost, and add-on features. Calculate your effective per-GB rate by dividing total spend by total bytes delivered. Then model that same traffic against the 2026 rate cards above. If the delta between your current provider and an alternative exceeds 30% at your volume tier, run a 2-week parallel deployment on your staging domain and measure p50/p95 TTFB, cache-hit ratio, and origin offload. The pricing difference only matters if the performance holds. If it does, you've found budget to reallocate to infrastructure that actually needs it.