Fastly CDN Pricing 2026: Bandwidth, Requests & Hidden Costs

A single misconfigured origin shield on Fastly can turn a $1,200/month bill into a $9,000 surprise before your finance team even opens the invoice. Fastly CDN pricing remains usage-based in 2026, but the actual cost per workload depends on regional bandwidth tiers, request volumes, TLS add-ons, and security bundles that compound faster than most teams model. This article gives you the current rate card as of Q2 2026, a region-by-region cost breakdown, a comparison against four major alternatives, and a workload-profile decision matrix you won't find in any vendor's docs. Use it to audit your current spend or model a migration.

How Fastly CDN Pricing Works in 2026

Fastly bills on two axes: egress bandwidth (per GB delivered) and HTTP/HTTPS requests (per 10,000). Both are tiered by geography. There is no flat-rate plan, no free tier, and no bundled request allowance. You pay for what you push, measured at the edge. As of May 2026, the published pay-as-you-go rates have not changed from the figures Fastly lists on its pricing page, though negotiated enterprise contracts can reduce these by 20–40% depending on commit volume.

Fastly Bandwidth Pricing by Region (2026)

The first 10 TB each month is billed at these rates. Beyond 10 TB, Fastly applies volume discounts that vary by contract.

These rates make Fastly competitive in NA/EU but expensive for workloads with significant emerging-market traffic. Serving 50 TB/month split 60/20/20 across NA, APAC, and India/Africa lands you around $8,600/month in bandwidth alone before request charges or add-ons.

Fastly Request Pricing per 10,000 Requests (2026)

Request costs look negligible until you do the math on API-heavy or small-object workloads. A site serving 500 million requests/month in NA adds $375 to the bill. That same volume in India/Africa adds $800. For microservice architectures with high request-to-byte ratios, request charges can exceed bandwidth charges.

Hidden and Add-On Costs Most Teams Miss

The rate card is only part of the picture. Three line items consistently surprise teams migrating to or scaling on Fastly:

TLS/SSL Certificates

Fastly includes two SAN slots on shared certificates at no charge. Each additional domain costs $20/month. If you run 30 customer-facing domains, that is $560/month just for TLS. Premium managed TLS with dedicated certificates runs up to $275/domain/month, which adds up fast in multi-tenant SaaS architectures.

Security and WAF

Fastly's Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) starts at approximately $3,000/month as of Q2 2026. This is a hard floor regardless of traffic volume, making it disproportionately expensive for smaller teams that still need L7 protection. Enterprise plans with full managed rulesets and SOC integration escalate well beyond that.

Real-Time Log Streaming

Log streaming to third-party endpoints (S3, BigQuery, Datadog, etc.) is included in the base product, but the volume of log data generated at scale can trigger costs on the receiving end. This is not a Fastly charge per se, but teams consistently underestimate it when modeling total delivery cost.

Fastly CDN Cost vs. Alternatives in 2026

The delta is stark at scale. At 100 TB/month in NA, Fastly's list price for bandwidth alone exceeds $10,000. BlazingCDN covers that same volume for $350/month with overages at $0.0035/GB — delivering stability and fault tolerance comparable to CloudFront at a fraction of the cost. Enterprise clients like Sony use BlazingCDN for high-volume workloads where the per-GB economics of premium CDNs simply stop making sense.

Workload-Profile Decision Matrix: Which CDN Fits?

Pricing tables don't answer the real question: which CDN fits your actual traffic shape? Here's a matrix based on five common workload profiles, modeled at 50 TB/month with traffic weighted 70% NA/EU and 30% APAC.

If your workload doesn't fit neatly into one row, model the blended cost across all three axes (bandwidth, requests, add-ons) before signing a commit. Fastly's strength is edge programmability and sub-second purge. If you don't use either, you are paying a premium for capabilities that don't touch your critical path.

Practical Ways to Reduce Fastly CDN Cost

Tune Cache Hit Ratios Above 95%

Every cache miss is an origin fetch that costs you twice: once in origin compute and once in bandwidth out the edge. Audit your Vary headers and normalize query strings in VCL. A 5-point cache hit ratio improvement on 50 TB/month saves roughly $600/month in bandwidth alone.

Compress at the Edge, Not Just the Origin

Enable Brotli on text-based responses. Fastly supports on-the-fly Brotli compression. The size reduction (typically 15–20% over gzip for HTML/JS/CSS) directly reduces billed egress bytes.

Consolidate TLS Domains

Wildcard certs or SANs that cover multiple subdomains under a single Fastly TLS configuration eliminate per-domain fees. If you run 40 domains, restructuring to 5 wildcards saves $700/month.

Negotiate Annual Commits

Fastly's published rates are pay-as-you-go ceilings. With a 12-month bandwidth commit, discounts of 20–40% are standard as of 2026. If your traffic is predictable within ±15%, a commit almost always wins.

FAQ

How does Fastly charge for bandwidth and requests?

Fastly charges per GB of egress bandwidth and per 10,000 HTTP/HTTPS requests, both tiered by geographic region. North America and Europe are the cheapest tiers; South Korea, India, and Africa are the most expensive. The two charges appear as separate line items on your invoice.

What is Fastly full-site delivery pricing?

Fastly does not publish a separate "full-site delivery" SKU. Full-site delivery uses the same bandwidth and request rates as static content delivery. The cost difference comes from lower cache hit ratios on dynamic content, which drives more origin fetches and higher effective per-request costs.

Does Fastly have a free tier?

No. Fastly offers a free developer trial with limited traffic, but there is no permanently free tier comparable to Cloudflare's Free plan. Production usage is billed from the first byte.

How much does Fastly charge per 10,000 requests in Asia?

As of Q2 2026, Fastly charges $0.009 per 10,000 requests in the Asia-Pacific / South America / Australia-NZ tier. For South Korea, India, and Africa, the rate is $0.016 per 10,000 requests.

Can I use Fastly without the WAF?

Yes. The WAF (Next-Gen WAF / Signal Sciences) is a separate product with a $3,000/month minimum. You can use Fastly purely for delivery and handle L7 security elsewhere — at your origin, through a separate WAF provider, or via VCL-based custom logic for basic filtering.

Is Fastly cheaper than CloudFront?

At list price in NA/EU, CloudFront ($0.085/GB for the first 10 TB) undercuts Fastly ($0.12/GB) by roughly 30%. However, CloudFront adds per-request charges, origin fetch fees, and invalidation costs that can close the gap or flip the comparison depending on workload shape. Model both on your actual traffic before deciding.

Run the Numbers This Week

Pull your last three months of CDN invoices and break them into three columns: bandwidth cost, request cost, and add-on cost (TLS, WAF, log streaming sinks). Map your traffic by region. Then model the same workload against at least two alternatives using the rates and the decision matrix above. The exercise takes about two hours and frequently reveals that 20–50% of a team's CDN bill comes from a workload profile that a different provider serves more efficiently. If you find that bandwidth dominates and edge compute isn't in your critical path, the per-GB gap between $0.12 and $0.004 is worth a proof-of-concept.