Cloudflare Bandwidth Costs 2026: What You Pay and How to Cut It

Cloudflare bills no per-GB delivery fee on its self-serve plans (Pro lists at $25 a month and Business at $250 billed monthly, Cloudflare plans page, checked November 2026), so Cloudflare bandwidth costs surface elsewhere: origin egress on every cache miss, per-GB add-ons such as Argo Smart Routing, and Cache Reserve storage and operations. At 100 TB a month and an 85% cache hit ratio, 15 TB still leaves your cloud origin, about $1,350 at a $0.09 per GB list-rate egress estimate (2026). This brief prices each line item, models four overage scenarios, derives a Cache Reserve breakeven rule and ranks nine cost cuts.

How we compared, and who is writing. BlazingCDN publishes this blog and is one of the providers compared in this article. Every price is the provider's own published list price at the stated volume, before negotiated discounts, read on the official pricing pages linked below; the check date stands next to each figure. Price tables are ordered by that list price, lowest first, and a price order is not a measurement of delivery quality. Treat the BlazingCDN figure like every other figure here: a published number to verify on your own traffic.

Sources: Cloudflare pricing, bunny.net pricing, CDN77 pricing, Amazon CloudFront pricing, BlazingCDN pricing.

Where Cloudflare bandwidth costs actually come from

The edge rarely sets the bill. Money moves where Cloudflare fetches from your origin, where an add-on meters per GB, and where you pay to keep objects. Add-on rates below are Cloudflare's 2023 published figures, labeled as estimates: confirm them in your dashboard before budgeting.

Only two lines scale with every byte you deliver, Argo and origin egress, so those two decide a 100 TB month.

Bandwidth overage charges: four scenarios at 100 TB a month

Cloudflare's self-serve plans carry no per-GB bandwidth overage charges, and Enterprise overage terms sit inside a quote-based contract. The overage you actually see is metered add-ons and cloud egress. This model assumes 100 TB a month, Pro at $25, origin egress at $0.09 per GB (estimate) and Argo at about $0.10 per GB (2023 rate).

Argo across a whole 100 TB zone ($10,000) costs about 7.4 times the origin egress beneath it ($1,350), so routing scope moves the bill far more than plan tier.

Cloudflare Cache Reserve pricing and its breakeven object size

Cloudflare Cache Reserve pricing, at its 2023 published rates, is $0.015 per GB-month of storage, $4.50 per million writes and $0.36 per million reads, on a paid plan. It saves money only when the origin egress it prevents exceeds those charges, and that depends more on object size than on total traffic.

The math works per object. One write costs $0.0000045, the egress of 50 KB at $0.09 per GB. One read costs $0.00000036, the egress of 4 KB. Storage at $0.015 per GB-month is one sixth of a single origin fetch at $0.09, so a stored byte covers its rent if it replaces one origin fetch every six months.

• Objects over 50 KB (installers, video segments, product images): enable; one avoided fetch repays the write.
• Objects from 4 KB to 50 KB: enable only where each write earns several reads before eviction.
• Objects under 4 KB: exclude; every read costs more than the egress it saves.
• At a $0.05 per GB egress rate the thresholds rise to about 90 KB and 7 KB.

Cache Reserve only accepts cacheable responses that meet a minimum TTL set in Cloudflare's documentation, so fix cache headers before paying for persistence.

How to cut Cloudflare bandwidth costs: nine fixes ranked by savings per hour

Ordered by this blog's estimate of dollars saved per engineering hour in the scenario model.

1. Split Argo by zone. Argo is enabled per zone, so keep checkout, APIs and real-time traffic on an Argo zone and static assets on a zone without it. Scenario C drops the Argo line from $10,000 to $500.
2. Enable Tiered Cache with Smart Tiered Cache Topology. Misses funnel through an upper tier near the origin instead of each edge fetching separately.
3. Push hit ratio above 90% with Cache Rules. Mark versioned static paths eligible for cache, set Edge TTL to 30 days or longer, drop tracking query strings from the cache key. At 100 TB, each point is 1 TB, or $90, of egress.
4. Hunt DYNAMIC and BYPASS on static files. A cf-cache-status of DYNAMIC on a bundle means no rule made it cacheable; BYPASS usually traces to origin Cache-Control of private, no-cache or max-age=0.
5. Remove egress at the storage layer. Move hot static origins to R2, or to a Bandwidth Alliance partner such as Backblaze B2 that waives egress to Cloudflare under its current terms.
6. Gate Cache Reserve by object size using the thresholds above, path by path.
7. Pre-compress text with Brotli at the origin. HTML, JSON, CSS and JavaScript commonly shrink by more than half (typical range, verify on your payloads), cutting bytes per miss.
8. Resize images before delivery, and benchmark Cloudflare Images transformation billing against origin-side processing at your volume.
9. Audit Workers subrequests. A Worker that fetches the origin on every request, or fans out to several upstreams, multiplies egress; route subrequests through the cache.

Diagnostics and rollback before you change cache rules

Export 30 days from the GraphQL Analytics API, using the httpRequestsAdaptiveGroups dataset grouped by cache status and content type, summing edge response bytes (confirm field names in your account schema). Investigate any zone where MISS plus BYPASS exceeds 20% of bytes, then reconcile those bytes against your cloud invoice.

Roll out one rule at a time on a single path, and watch origin 5xx rates and the cache status mix for 24 hours. Disable old rules rather than deleting them so reverting is one toggle, and purge by URL, tag or prefix where your plan allows, never everything.

What 100 TB a month costs on Cloudflare and dedicated delivery CDNs

Rows are sorted by published monthly cost at 100 TB of delivery, lowest first, excluding origin egress and the add-ons modeled above.

On list price Cloudflare's self-serve plans are the lowest line at 100 TB, so your real Cloudflare cost hinges on add-ons, origin egress and traffic-type terms.

Disclosure: BlazingCDN publishes this blog. The order above follows the stated key only and is not a quality ranking.

For the large-file share of a Cloudflare bill, BlazingCDN lists $415 for 100 TB a month as of November 2026, from $5 per TB down to $2.50 per TB at volume, with no request fees and no regional multipliers. It is not a peer of Cloudflare in platform breadth, so the usual pattern keeps Cloudflare in front of the application and moves installers, video segments and game builds to a separate hostname or a weighted DNS split, as the BlazingCDN and Cloudflare cost comparison lays out. Origin egress still applies on misses; origin shield and request coalescing are included on every plan.

When another provider fits better

Up to 50 TB a month, published flat plans can cost less than BlazingCDN's $215 at 50 TB (as of November 2026): Amazon CloudFront Pro at $15 a month when traffic fits its 10 million request allowance (which carries 50 TB only at an average response of about 5 MB or larger), Cloudflare Pro at $25 for traffic its terms allow, and Amazon CloudFront Business at $200 between about 46 and 50 TB (checked November 2026). A WAF, bot management or edge compute from one vendor points to Cloudflare or Fastly. HTTP/3 or WebSockets requirements point to Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront, since BlazingCDN does not support them. Under 5 TB a month, bunny.net's $1 minimum undercuts a $25 minimum. And if Argo's latency gain measurably lifts checkout conversion, keep Argo on that zone.

FAQ: Cloudflare bandwidth costs and overage charges

Does Cloudflare charge for bandwidth on Pro and Business plans?

No per-GB delivery fee appears on Cloudflare's self-serve plans: Pro lists at $25 a month and Business at $250 billed monthly (checked November 2026). Costs grow through metered add-ons such as Argo, origin egress from your cloud on every cache miss, and terms that require paid media or storage products for video on non-Enterprise plans.

How do Cloudflare Enterprise bandwidth overage charges work?

Cloudflare Enterprise is quote-based with no public list price (checked November 2026), so any overage rate above committed traffic is written into the contract. Before signing, ask for the committed volume, the unit rate above it, how billable traffic is measured each month, and whether add-ons like Argo or Cache Reserve meter separately from the base agreement.

Is Cloudflare R2 egress really zero?

Cloudflare R2 publishes no egress fee, with storage at $0.015 per GB-month and separate charges for read and write operations (2023 published rates). Moving a frequently missed origin from a cloud bucket billed around $0.09 per GB removes that egress line, but heavy request counts still cost money, so model operations before migrating.

Can Cloudflare restrict video delivery on a Pro plan?

Yes. Cloudflare's Service-Specific Terms, checked November 2026, require its paid media or storage products to serve video or a disproportionate share of large files on non-Enterprise plans. Teams shipping video segments, installers or game builds at volume should budget for Cloudflare Stream, R2 or an Enterprise contract, or route that traffic to a separate delivery CDN.

Price your Cloudflare traffic line by line this week

Pull 30 days of bytes by cache status and content type, attach your real cloud egress rate, and rebuild the four-scenario table with your own numbers: current state, Argo split by zone, hit ratio at 95%, and Cache Reserve limited to objects above the breakeven size. Rank each change by monthly dollars saved per engineering hour and ship the top two first. In the model above, the answer sits in the Argo and MISS rows long before any vendor discussion.

If the heavy static share still dominates after that, the BlazingCDN CDN cost calculator prices the same monthly terabytes on progressive tiers from $5 per TB, as of November 2026.