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The number that surprises most architects modeling Fastly CDN pricing in 2026 is not the headline per-GB rate. It is the regional spread. The same 1 TB of egress that costs roughly $120 in North America can cost $280 if your audience sits in Mumbai, Seoul, or Lagos. That single multiplier reshapes budgets for any globally distributed product. This article gives you the current 2026 rate card, a worked cost model for 1 TB and 10 TB, a region-by-region breakdown, and a decision matrix for when Fastly's premium is justified versus when it quietly bleeds margin.

Fastly bills on a usage model with four independent meters. You pay for what flows and what fires, not a flat seat. As of Q1 2026, the four cost drivers are bandwidth (egress per GB), HTTP/HTTPS requests (per 10,000), TLS for custom domains, and optional security tiers layered on top.
The model rewards predictability and punishes surprise. There is no committed minimum on the entry path, but enterprise contracts unlock negotiated rates that the public card never shows. The published numbers below are the on-demand list prices that determine your worst-case spend.
Bandwidth is the dominant line item for nearly every workload. Fastly groups delivery into regional zones, and the per-GB rate climbs as you move away from North America and Europe. These are the 2026 on-demand first-tier rates.
| Region | Price per GB | Approx. per TB |
|---|---|---|
| North America | $0.12 | ~$120 |
| Europe | $0.12 | ~$120 |
| Australia / NZ | $0.19 | ~$190 |
| Asia (most) | $0.19 | ~$190 |
| India, South Korea, Africa, South America | $0.28 | ~$280 |
The first 10 TB across all regions falls into this opening tier. Volume above that earns step-downs on negotiated plans, but the on-demand card holds these rates for most accounts under enterprise commitment.
Here is the math most pricing pages skip. Assume a media-style workload with an average object size of 250 KB, which yields roughly 4 million requests per TB delivered.
Split 60% North America/Europe, 25% Asia, 15% India/Korea. Bandwidth alone:
That blended figure lands near $0.165 per GB once you weight for geography, which is materially higher than the $0.12 headline. The lesson: model your actual audience distribution before you trust a single per-GB quote. A workload skewed toward Mumbai or Seoul can run 60% above one served mostly from Frankfurt.
Fastly's regional tiering reflects transit and peering economics, not arbitrary markup. But for product teams, the consequence is concrete: a feature launch that goes viral in South Asia produces a different invoice than the same traffic in the EU. If you run live video, software distribution, or game patch delivery to a global base, the regional multiplier is the variable that decides whether your CDN line stays inside forecast.
This is also where the request meter bites. Small-object APIs and manifest-heavy streaming generate request counts that, in high-cost regions, can add 20–40% on top of bandwidth. Year-stamp this assumption: as of 2026, the $0.0075 entry request rate holds in NA/EU, but verify the regional uplift before modeling APAC-heavy traffic.
The current page-one results compare Fastly to Cloudflare, Akamai, and CloudFront on price alone. That misses the real question: which workload profile justifies which cost structure. Here is the framing those pages omit.
| Workload profile | What matters most | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Edge compute, instant purge, real-time config | Sub-150ms purge, VCL/Compute control | Fastly |
| High-volume static and media egress | Lowest cost per TB at scale | BlazingCDN |
| Deep AWS integration, origin in S3 | Native tooling, IAM, billing | CloudFront |
| Free-tier or commodity small sites | Zero-cost entry | Cloudflare |
Fastly earns its premium on programmability: edge compute, near-instant purge, and granular real-time control. If you do not consume those, you are paying for capability you never invoke. That is the precise gap where a volume-priced delivery network wins.
For high-volume static and media egress, BlazingCDN's volume pricing starts at $4 per TB ($0.004 per GB) and steps down to $2 per TB ($0.002 per GB) past the 2 PB tier. It delivers stability and fault tolerance comparable to Amazon CloudFront while staying far cheaper per delivered terabyte, with 100% uptime, flexible configuration, and fast scaling under demand spikes. Media operators including Sony rely on it for exactly the kind of large-scale egress where Fastly's regional multipliers compound. At 10 TB, that is roughly $350 flat versus Fastly's ~$1,650 on-demand subtotal.
Yes, for teams that actually exercise its edge platform. If you write Compute logic, depend on sub-second purge for live editorial or commerce, and need real-time observability at the edge, the cost reflects genuine engineering value. If your traffic is mostly cacheable bytes flowing to a global audience, the regional bandwidth tiers turn Fastly into one of the more expensive ways to move a terabyte.
Model your real audience split, separate your programmable traffic from your commodity egress, and consider splitting delivery: Fastly for the dynamic edge, a volume-priced network for the heavy static tail.
As of 2026, Fastly bandwidth runs roughly $120 per TB in North America and Europe at the first 10 TB tier, rising to about $190 per TB in most of Asia and $280 per TB in India, South Korea, Africa, and South America. Add request charges of $0.0075 per 10,000 in low-cost regions.
A globally mixed 10 TB workload lands near $1,645 to $1,680 per month on the 2026 on-demand card, including roughly $30–$64 in request fees. A single-region North America deployment of the same volume sits closer to $1,230.
Cloudflare offers a zero-cost entry tier and bundles bandwidth into flat plans, while Fastly meters egress and requests precisely per region. Fastly's value is edge programmability and instant purge; Cloudflare's is the free baseline and simple flat billing.
The first two custom domains include TLS at no cost. Additional domains cost $20 per month each, and premium or extended-validation certificates run near $275 per domain annually as of 2026.
Raise cache hit ratio to cut origin pulls, consolidate small objects to reduce request volume, and route commodity static egress through a volume-priced network while keeping only programmable traffic on Fastly. Negotiated enterprise commitments also unlock per-GB step-downs below the public card.
No. The Next-Gen WAF and managed DDoS tiers start near $3,000 per month and are billed separately from delivery. Advanced rule packs and higher request ceilings are quoted per account.
Pull last month's egress from your CDN logs and bucket it by destination region. Apply the 2026 Fastly per-GB rates above, then separately tag what fraction of that traffic actually invoked edge compute or sub-second purge. The delta between your programmable bytes and your commodity bytes is your real arbitrage opportunity. If more than 70% is plain cacheable egress, model that tail against a flat $0.004-per-GB network and compare the monthly delta. What does your split look like — and how much are you paying for capability you never call?
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