CDN Cost Calculator
PerformanceEstimate your monthly CDN bill from data transfer volume and request count. Works with AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, and any per-GB CDN provider.
Last updated: April 2026
This calculator is designed for real-world usage based on typical engineering scenarios and publicly available documentation.
A CDN cost calculator helps you forecast your monthly bill before traffic spikes catch you off guard. CDN providers charge along two dimensions: the volume of data transferred out to end users (per GB) and the number of HTTP requests served (per 10,000). Both costs grow with traffic, and they scale independently — a site serving large files pays more on transfer, while a high-QPS API pays more on requests. This calculator covers the core cost model used by AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare Pay-As-You-Go, Fastly, and most other CDNs. Enter your expected monthly data transfer in GB, your request volume in millions, and the per-GB and per-10k-request prices from your provider's pricing page. The result is your projected monthly CDN spend, split by line item. Use the calculator when budgeting a new product launch, estimating costs for a marketing campaign that will spike traffic, or comparing providers. You can also run multiple scenarios — current traffic, 5× growth, 10× growth — to understand how your CDN costs scale before they appear on your bill.
How to Calculate CDN Cost
1. Find your CDN provider's data transfer price ($/GB) and request price ($/10,000 requests) on their pricing page. 2. Measure or estimate your monthly data transfer in GB — check your CDN dashboard or web analytics. 3. Measure or estimate your monthly request count in millions — HTTP requests served, not unique visitors. 4. Enter all four values into the calculator above. 5. The calculator multiplies transfer GB × $/GB, then adds (requests × 1,000,000 ÷ 10,000) × $/10k to produce your total monthly CDN cost.
Formula
Total CDN Cost = Transfer Cost + Request Cost Transfer Cost = Data Transfer (GB) × Transfer Price ($/GB) Request Cost = (Monthly Requests × 1,000,000 ÷ 10,000) × Request Price ($/10k) Data Transfer — gigabytes served to end users per month Monthly Requests — HTTP requests served per month (in millions) Transfer Price — CDN provider's per-GB egress rate (e.g. $0.085 for CloudFront) Request Price — CDN provider's per-10,000-request rate (e.g. $0.0100 for CloudFront)
Example CDN Cost Calculations
Example 1 — Small SaaS app (CloudFront pricing)
Transfer: 100 GB × $0.085 / GB = $8.50
Requests: 2M × (1,000,000 ÷ 10,000) × $0.0100 = $2.00
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Total per month: $10.50 Example 2 — Media streaming site (500 GB, high requests)
Transfer: 500 GB × $0.085 / GB = $42.50
Requests: 10M × (1,000,000 ÷ 10,000) × $0.0100 = $10.00
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Total per month: $52.50 → $630 / year Example 3 — High-traffic e-commerce (2TB transfer, 50M requests)
Transfer: 2,000 GB × $0.085 / GB = $170.00
Requests: 50M × (1,000,000 ÷ 10,000) × $0.0100 = $50.00
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Total per month: $220.00 → switching to Cloudflare Pro ($20/mo flat) saves ~$200/mo CDN Pricing by Provider
| Model | Input / 1M tokens | Output / 1M tokens |
|---|---|---|
| AWS CloudFront | $0.085/GB | $0.0100/10k req |
| Cloudflare Pay-As-You-Go | $0.000/GB | $0.0050/10k req |
| Cloudflare Pro | $20/mo flat | Included |
| Fastly | $0.120/GB | $0.0090/10k req |
| Azure CDN (Microsoft) | $0.087/GB | $0.0090/10k req |
| Google Cloud CDN | $0.080/GB | $0.0075/10k req |
| BunnyCDN | $0.010/GB | Included |
Prices are approximate. Verify on your provider's pricing page before budgeting.
Tips to Reduce Your CDN Bill
- › Enable long-lived cache headers (Cache-Control: max-age=31536000) on static assets. Every cache hit is a request that doesn't hit origin and reduces both request and transfer costs.
- › Use Cloudflare's free or Pro plan if your traffic profile matches — free egress and low request pricing makes it dramatically cheaper than CloudFront for most web apps.
- › Compress all text assets (HTML, CSS, JS, JSON) with Brotli or gzip before delivery. Compression can reduce transfer volume by 60–80%, directly cutting your per-GB bill.
- › Serve images in modern formats (WebP, AVIF) and size them to display dimensions. Oversized images are the single largest source of avoidable CDN egress on content sites.
- › Use a <a href="/calculators/bandwidth-cost-calculator">Bandwidth Cost Calculator</a> alongside this tool to model your full egress spend including non-CDN traffic.
- › Review your CDN dashboard monthly. Unexplained spikes in request count often indicate hotlinking, bot traffic, or missing cache rules — all of which you can cut before they hit your bill.
Notes
- › Results are estimates and may vary based on actual usage.
- › Always validate against your production environment.