Learn
Best CDN for Video Streaming in 2026: Full Comparison with Real Performance Data
Best CDN for Video Streaming in 2026: Full Comparison with Real Performance Data If you are choosing the best CDN for ...
At 100 TB/month, a single dollar difference per terabyte compounds to $1,200/year in pure delivery cost. That makes Leaseweb CDN pricing one of the details worth getting exactly right before you sign a commit. This article breaks down Leaseweb's 2026 tier structure per GB and per TB, maps overage mechanics, compares effective rates against five other providers at equivalent volumes, and gives you a workload-profile decision matrix so you can match your traffic shape to the cheapest viable option.

Leaseweb structures its Multi-CDN product around three published bandwidth tiers. The pricing below reflects the rates listed on leaseweb.com as of May 2026.
| Tier | Monthly Volume | Cost per GB | Effective Cost per TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Up to 50 TB | $0.010 | $10.00 |
| 2 | 50 – 500 TB | $0.009 | $9.00 |
| 3 | 500 TB+ | Custom | Custom (negotiable) |
Tier boundaries are based on calendar-month aggregate transfer. Leaseweb applies the lower rate only to bytes that fall within the higher tier, not retroactively to the full volume. That means your first 50 TB always costs $500, and bytes 50,001 GB through 500,000 GB bill at $0.009 each. Understand this before modeling blended rates.
Leaseweb does not publish a separate overage penalty rate. Traffic beyond your committed tier rolls into the next tier's rate automatically. If you exceed 500 TB without a custom agreement in place, expect Leaseweb sales to reach out mid-cycle. The practical risk is not a surprise surcharge but an unplanned conversation about contract terms while your traffic is still flowing. Get the custom-tier pricing locked before you anticipate crossing 500 TB.
Raw per-GB rates only tell half the story. Minimum commits, regional surcharges, request fees, and origin-shield costs change the effective price dramatically. The table below normalizes published 2026 pricing for a 100 TB/month workload delivered primarily to North America and Europe.
| Provider | Per-GB Rate (100 TB) | Per-TB Effective | Request Fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leaseweb Multi-CDN | $0.009 | $9.00 | Included |
| BlazingCDN | $0.0035 | $3.50 | Included |
| Akamai | ~$0.040 (negotiated) | ~$40.00 | Separate |
| Cloudflare (Enterprise) | ~$0.05 (list) | ~$50.00 | Included |
| Amazon CloudFront | $0.020 – $0.060 | $20.00 – $60.00 | $0.0075 – $0.01 per 10K |
At 100 TB, Leaseweb lands at $900/month. CloudFront's blended NA+EU rate comes in around $2,000–$3,500 depending on region mix and request volume. Akamai and Cloudflare Enterprise are typically negotiable, but list pricing puts them 4–5x higher than Leaseweb. The gap matters most for media-heavy, large-object workloads where request fees are negligible relative to transfer costs.
Choosing a CDN on cost per GB alone is like picking a database on storage price per row. The workload shape determines where your money actually goes. Use this matrix to match your traffic profile to the provider whose pricing structure rewards it.
| Workload Profile | Dominant Cost Driver | Best-Fit Provider (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| VOD / large-file download (10 TB – 100 TB) | Bandwidth (GB transferred) | BlazingCDN, Leaseweb |
| Live streaming (100 TB+) | Bandwidth + burst headroom | BlazingCDN (scales to 2 PB+), Leaseweb (custom tier) |
| API / small-object, high-RPS | Request fees | Cloudflare (included requests), Leaseweb |
| Multi-region, latency-sensitive SaaS | Regional pricing variance | CloudFront (AWS ecosystem), Akamai (edge compute) |
| Software/game distribution (bursty, global) | Peak-to-mean ratio, total TB | BlazingCDN (no burst penalties), Leaseweb |
Leaseweb's sweet spot is the 50–500 TB range where you need predictable, flat per-GB billing with no request-fee surprises. Below 50 TB, the $0.01/GB rate is respectable but not market-leading. Above 500 TB, everything is negotiable, and the conversation shifts to committed-use discounts and SLA terms where Leaseweb's published pricing no longer tells the full story.
Leaseweb's product is labeled "Multi-CDN" because it routes traffic across multiple upstream CDN providers rather than operating a single proprietary edge network. This means you get automatic failover across providers and, in theory, best-path selection per request. The trade-off is an abstraction layer you do not fully control. Cache purge propagation times, origin shield behavior, and TLS negotiation details depend on whichever upstream provider handles a given request. If your team needs fine-grained cache-key control or custom edge logic, verify that Leaseweb's multi-CDN orchestration layer exposes the knobs you need before committing.
For teams that need a single, directly operated CDN with transparent infrastructure and comparable fault tolerance to CloudFront, BlazingCDN's pricing page is worth evaluating. At the 100 TB tier, BlazingCDN runs $350/month flat with overages at $0.0035/GB, less than half of Leaseweb's effective rate. The platform delivers 100% uptime SLA, flexible configuration, and fast scaling under demand spikes. Clients like Sony use it in production. At 500 TB, the rate drops to $0.003/GB ($1,500/month), and at 2 PB it reaches $0.002/GB, which makes it one of the most cost-effective options available for sustained high-volume delivery in 2026.
Three costs that do not appear in Leaseweb's published per-GB rate but affect your real spend:
Modeling your true CDN cost requires summing: CDN transfer fees + origin egress + request fees (if any) + certificate costs + DNS/traffic-management costs. The provider with the lowest per-GB rate is not always the cheapest after origin egress and operational overhead are factored in.
As of Q2 2026, Leaseweb CDN charges $0.010 per GB for the first 50 TB/month and $0.009 per GB for volumes between 50 TB and 500 TB. Above 500 TB, pricing is custom and negotiated directly with the sales team.
Leaseweb does not apply a punitive overage surcharge. Traffic that exceeds one tier boundary is billed at the next tier's rate. However, exceeding 500 TB without a custom agreement in place will trigger a manual review, so it is advisable to pre-negotiate custom terms if you anticipate crossing that threshold.
At 100 TB/month, Leaseweb's effective rate is approximately $9/TB versus Cloudflare Enterprise's list rate of roughly $50/TB. Cloudflare includes unlimited requests and certain security features in its enterprise bundle, so the comparison depends on whether your workload is bandwidth-dominated or request-dominated.
Published pricing gives you $9/TB at the 50–500 TB tier. Custom contracts above 500 TB reportedly reach the $6–$8/TB range, though Leaseweb does not disclose these rates publicly. For comparison, BlazingCDN reaches $3/TB at 500 TB and $2/TB at 2 PB, both publicly listed.
Leaseweb publishes two concrete tier rates and one custom tier, which is more transparent than Akamai's fully quote-based model. Akamai's pricing depends on contract length, commit volume, and feature bundles, making direct comparison impossible without a formal quote. Leaseweb gives you a usable starting number before you talk to sales.
Pull your last 90 days of CDN transfer logs. Calculate your P95 daily volume, your peak-to-mean ratio, and your per-region split. Then model your monthly cost against Leaseweb's tiers and at least two alternatives using the matrix above. If your current provider cannot give you a clear per-GB rate that holds across regions without request-fee add-ons, you are overpaying. The difference between $9/TB and $3.50/TB at 100 TB is $6,600/year. At 500 TB, it is $36,000. That is not a rounding error; it is headcount.
Learn
Best CDN for Video Streaming in 2026: Full Comparison with Real Performance Data If you are choosing the best CDN for ...
Learn
Video CDN Providers Compared: BlazingCDN vs Cloudflare vs Akamai for OTT If you are choosing a video CDN for an OTT ...
Learn
Video CDN Pricing Explained: How to Stop Overpaying for Streaming Bandwidth Video already accounts for 38% of total ...