How Much Does Amazon CloudFront Cost Per GB?
CloudFront's first paid US delivery band costs $0.085 per GB on pay-as-you-go. That is not necessarily what you will pay. Free allowances reduce your chargeable usage, and flat-rate plans offer a different deal entirely. I'd check your billing model before doing any bandwidth math.
How CloudFront Pricing Is Structured and What the Bill Is Actually Based On
Your Amazon CloudFront cost starts with choosing between usage-based billing and a monthly plan per distribution. The prices here are in USD, using AWS's published rates before taxes and negotiated discounts.
Pay-As-You-Go And Flat-Rate Plans
With pay-as-you-go, viewer data transfer and HTTP or HTTPS requests are separate charges. Its monthly free allowance includes 1 TB of outgoing data and 10 million HTTP(S) requests. That is not the same offer as the Free flat-rate plan.
The flat-rate choices have these monthly allowances:
- Free: $0 per distribution, with 100 GB and 1 million requests.
- Pro: $15 per distribution, with 50 TB and 10 million requests.
- Business: $200 per distribution, with 50 TB and 125 million requests.
- Premium: $1,000 per distribution, with 50 TB and 500 million requests. Higher configurable allowances come at a new flat price.
These plans have no overage charges, but they are not unrestricted, unlimited delivery. AWS can adjust delivery when usage substantially exceeds allowances. Security features differ between tiers. Check your required configuration, not just the bandwidth allowance.
List Rates Versus Effective Cost
Keep the different meanings of “price per GB” separate. A list rate prices a particular usage band. Your blended effective cost divides the actual bill by delivered GB. A privately negotiated rate comes from your contract. A flat fee does not become a metered rate just because you divide it by traffic.
Use the same cost boundary for both estimates. Including origin and security costs in only one makes the comparison misleading.
What CloudFront Charges Per GB Across Regions and Volume Tiers
Under pay-as-you-go, the delivery edge's pricing geography matters, not simply where your S3 bucket lives. The following standard list rates apply to outgoing viewer data after the free allowance.
The first paid band is $0.110/GB in AWS's listed African and Middle Eastern locations. Japan and Australia/New Zealand start at $0.114/GB. The listed Southeast and East Asian markets start at $0.120/GB.
Apply The Bands To Chargeable Usage
The bands are incremental. Reaching a cheaper band does not reprice everything you already delivered that month. Only the usage within that band receives its rate. Do not multiply your whole billable volume by the cheapest tier you reach. Volume tiers are calculated separately for each delivery region, not pooled globally.
Do not subtract another free terabyte for each table row. The pay-as-you-go allowance applies across your account, rather than restarting for every distribution or geography.
Suppose you have exactly 9,000 chargeable US GB, all in the $0.085 band. That means 9,000 multiplied by $0.085 equals $765 for bandwidth alone.
Add requests and separately billed services. Estimate billable GB by delivery region rather than pricing every visitor as US traffic.
The CloudFront Add-Ons That Make the Real Bill Larger Than Expected
Bandwidth is only part of your AWS CloudFront bill. With many small objects, request-related fees can dominate despite modest transfer volume. With large video files, transferred bytes can dominate instead. Measure both before choosing an optimization.
Budget For Origin Shield
CloudFront Origin Shield pricing is regional request pricing, not extra cents per delivered GB. The rates per 10,000 requests are $0.0075 in the US, $0.009 in Europe and $0.016 in South America. The selected Shield region determines the price.
For cacheable traffic, the charge applies when requests reach Shield from another regional cache, not to every viewer request. Requests satisfied earlier do not all turn into Shield charges. Measure that additional cache layer's traffic before estimating its cost.
Separate The Other Costs
Other meaningful costs deserve separate lines in your estimate:
- Edge code: CloudFront Functions charges for executions; Lambda@Edge adds execution charges and compute based on duration and memory. Running code on every viewer request changes the arithmetic.
- Security: separately billed AWS WAF includes charges for its configured protections and processed requests. Include the actual rules you need rather than a generic “security included” assumption.
- Logging: real-time logs have publication charges plus pipeline costs. Standard logging being available without an activation fee does not make destination delivery or retained storage universally free.
- Invalidations and origin: invalidation paths beyond the allowance can cost extra. Your origin's storage and requests remain separate expenses, even when transfer into CloudFront is waived.
With an eligible flat plan, remove covered features from those extra charges. Do not double-count a bundled service, but do not assume every optional feature is covered either.
Cache Hits Versus Transferred Bytes
Caching does not make viewer bytes or viewer requests free. It reduces origin work. Compression can reduce the bytes actually delivered, which targets bandwidth spending directly. Uploads flowing from CloudFront to your origin can also incur separate transfer charges under pay-as-you-go.
Browser caching is a separate opportunity: when a browser reuses a fresh local copy without contacting CloudFront, that reuse produces neither a CDN request nor another download. Set cache lifetimes around how safely each file can be reused, rather than making everything expire immediately.
At What Traffic Volume CloudFront Becomes Expensive Relative to Alternatives
There is no universal traffic threshold. Your useful threshold is where another qualifying setup costs less for your workload after migration and ongoing operating costs. That can be very different from where another provider advertises a lower bandwidth rate.
Compare The Same Workload
Start your CDN pricing comparison with the same delivery geography and request count. Require equivalent security and the performance your users need. Compare your actual negotiated commitments against an eligible CloudFront flat plan, not just public pay-as-you-go rates against somebody else's promotional offer.
When evaluating affordable CDN providers, ask for a quote using your measured traffic rather than choosing from the lowest advertised number. Include any minimum spend and the price of features your application cannot do without.
A request-heavy workload might outgrow Pro's request allowance while remaining comfortably below its transfer allowance. Conversely, a bandwidth-heavy workload that fits a flat plan may have no marginal delivery charge to eliminate.
Include The Cost Of Switching
I'd compare a normal month with a busy month. Then ask whether the expected savings justify the work even if traffic grows more slowly than forecast. A commitment based on optimistic growth can leave you paying for capacity you never use.
Compare savings with migration, maintenance and rollback costs. A route that saves less than its operating cost is not cheaper for you.
How Multi-CDN Routing Reduces CloudFront Spend Without Leaving AWS
You can keep your origin in AWS and retain CloudFront for some traffic while another CDN handles selected delivery. For example, you could pilot public downloads on another network while keeping application traffic on CloudFront. The objective is cheaper qualifying delivery, not moving everything.
Before switching, test origin authorization and matching cache rules. A private S3 bucket restricted to CloudFront will need an appropriate access design for another CDN; making the bucket public is not a sensible shortcut to lower delivery costs.
Count Egress And Separate Caches
There is an important transfer catch. AWS-origin fetch transfer into CloudFront is waived, but another CDN fetching from that AWS origin does not automatically receive the same exemption. Add the resulting AWS egress to your comparison.
Splitting traffic also means filling separate caches. Your estimate should include cache warmup and extra origin requests, alongside routing engineering and any new provider commitments. Lower CloudFront usage can also reduce volume discounts on the traffic you leave behind.
Calculate And Test Net Savings
Compare your CDN infrastructure expenses with this monthly calculation:
Net savings equals the CloudFront bill reduction minus additional CDN charges minus additional AWS charges minus added routing and operating costs.
Calculate CloudFront's reduction after repricing the traffic you retain. Diverting traffic from an unchanged flat plan or unused committed capacity does not immediately reduce that fixed payment. Plan changes have their own billing timing, so model the month when savings begin.
Start a small pilot with explicit limits:
- Route a small share of one suitable workload, keeping a tested rollback route.
- Compare latency and error rates against the CloudFront baseline for the same audience.
- Track cache hit ratios and origin bytes, including the initial cache warmup.
- Set spending limits and stop expansion if total delivery cost rises.
Expand only after the measured cost stays lower without breaking your performance or security requirements.