AWS CloudFront Pricing Explained: The Regional Tax Nobody Mentions (2026)

The Pricing Page That Made Me Feel Poor

It was 2023, deep in the Clickly years — my Bitly-style URL shortener that never made a rupee, but taught me more than any job did. I’d already sorted out where the files lived. Now I needed a CDN in front of them, because a URL shortener that redirects slowly is just a broken link with extra steps. Speed was the entire product.

And the internet’s default answer, the one every tutorial and every ex-colleague gives you, is: AWS CloudFront. It’s the CDN half of the classic “S3 + CloudFront” combo — you dump files in a bucket, put CloudFront in front, and now your assets are cached at edge locations near your users. It’s mature, it’s everywhere, it’s what the big companies run. So I opened the pricing page like a good little engineer.

The free tier looked amazing. Then I scrolled to the part where they list the price by region. And because my users were going to be in India, I found the exact number that AWS charges to serve a gigabyte in India. It was higher than the US number. Meaningfully higher.

I sat there for a second, genuinely a little offended. The people most desperate to save money — founders in India, in South America, in Africa, building for local audiences — pay more per gigabyte than a startup in San Francisco serving San Francisco. That afternoon is why I write these posts. Let me break down exactly how CloudFront prices in 2026, where the free tier is genuinely great, and where the “regional tax” quietly punishes the wrong people.

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What CloudFront Actually Bills You For

Strip away the marketing and CloudFront’s classic pay-as-you-go bill is just two meters running at once.

1. Data transfer out. Every gigabyte CloudFront serves from its edge to a real human’s browser is metered, and the rate depends on which edge location served it. This is the big number.

2. Requests. Every single HTTP or HTTPS request — every image, every API call, every font file — is counted and billed per 10,000. Individually microscopic. In aggregate, on a busy site, not nothing.

There are smaller line items too — invalidation requests beyond the first thousand a month, field-level encryption, CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge if you run compute at the edge — but for 95% of people the bill is transfer plus requests. One important mercy: data transfer from S3 or your other AWS origins into CloudFront is free. It’s the last hop, edge-to-user, that you pay for. That’s the same asymmetry that makes S3 and Azure Blob storage quietly expensive to serve — cheap to hold, expensive to hand out.

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The Free Tier Is Genuinely Good (Credit Where It’s Due)

I spend a lot of these posts telling you to run from AWS. So let me be fair about the one part CloudFront gets right, because honesty is the whole point of this site.

CloudFront has a permanent always-free tier, and it’s not one of those “free for 12 months then we bill you” traps. Every single month, forever, you get:

• 1 TB of data transfer out
• 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests
• 2 million CloudFront Functions invocations

Sit with that first number. One terabyte a month, free, on the world’s most-deployed CDN. For a landing page, a docs site, a small SaaS serving a few thousand users some images and JSON — you will not touch that ceiling for a long, long time. This is a legitimately generous offer, and if all you ever do is stay inside it, CloudFront costs you nothing and serves your files from 750-plus edge locations. No notes. It’s good.

The trouble, as always with AWS, is what happens at 1 TB and one byte.

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The Regional Tax: Where It Gets Ugly

The moment you cross the free tier, you hit the rate card. And the rate card is not one price — it’s a map. Here’s the data-transfer-out cost per GB in 2026, for the first paid tier (up to 10 TB a month), after your free terabyte:

Region	Data transfer out, per GB
US, Canada, Mexico	$0.085
Europe (+ Israel, Türkiye)	$0.085
India	$0.109
South America	$0.110
Japan / Australia	$0.114
Asia Pacific (Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul…)	$0.120
Africa & Middle East	$0.110–$0.140

Read that column top to bottom. Serving a gigabyte to a user in Singapore costs about 41% more than serving the identical file to a user in Ohio. India runs ~28% higher. Africa can be 65% higher. Same bytes, same product, same CloudFront — the geography of your audience is a tax.

The requests meter has the same shape. In the US you pay $0.0100 per 10,000 HTTPS requests (HTTP is a hair cheaper at $0.0075). In Europe and India that HTTPS rate climbs to about $0.0120, and in South America it’s roughly $0.0220 — more than double the US. If you’re serving a media-heavy or API-heavy app to a global-south audience, you get hit twice: pricier bytes and pricier requests.

None of these numbers are outrageous in isolation. That’s the trick. Eight and a half cents sounds like a rounding error. But a modest app serving 5 TB a month to an Indian audience is roughly 4 TB × $0.109 ≈ $450 after the free terabyte — for a CDN, on a product that might be making nothing. And there’s no ceiling. The meter just runs, the way every AWS meter runs, quietly, while you sleep.

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The New Flat-Rate Plans: AWS Admitting the Problem

Here’s the genuinely new thing in 2026, and I have to give AWS credit for reading the room. In late 2025 they launched flat-rate CloudFront plans — a fixed monthly price, no per-GB math, and crucially, no overage charges. There are four tiers:

Plan	Price / month	Data transfer	Requests	S3 credit
Free	$0	100 GB	1 M	5 GB
Pro	$15	50 TB	10 M	50 GB
Business	$200	50 TB	125 M	1 TB
Premium	$1,000	50 TB	500 M	5 TB

Each plan bundles more than the CDN: AWS WAF and DDoS protection, bot management, DNS, TLS certificates, edge compute, and monthly S3 storage credits, all rolled into one number. Blocked attacks don’t count against your allowance. For a business that has to be on AWS and wants a bill it can predict, this is a real improvement over the pay-as-you-go anxiety. The $15 Pro plan giving you 50 TB flat is, honestly, not a bad deal at all if you’re already committed to the ecosystem.

But read the fine print in two places.

First, the flat Free plan is worse than the pay-as-you-go free tier. The flat Free plan gives you 100 GB of transfer and 1 million requests. The old always-free tier gives you 1 TB and 10 million requests. So the plan literally named “Free” is a tenth as generous on the meters that matter — you’re trading raw allowance for the bundled WAF and DNS. Read that twice, because it’s the kind of thing that costs a distracted founder real money.

Second, “no overages” doesn’t mean “unlimited.” When you blow past your allowance, AWS doesn’t bill you — they degrade you. Their own docs say they’ll start serving your traffic “from fewer or more distant edge locations.” So the punishment for a viral moment isn’t a scary invoice; it’s your CDN quietly getting slower, which for a lot of products is the same problem wearing a nicer suit. Predictable price, less predictable performance. That’s the trade.

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Why I Still Put Bunny (or Cloudflare) In Front Instead

If you’ve read my love letter to Bunny, you know how this ends. But let me make the money case cleanly, because it’s the whole reason I bother learning any of this.

Bunny charges a flat, boring, region-tiered rate with none of AWS’s account-wide entanglement. Its Standard network is $0.01/GB in North America and Europe, rising to about $0.03 in Asia and up to $0.06 in the Middle East and Africa — and its Volume network is a flat $0.005/GB everywhere. Minimum spend is one dollar a month. One. Dollar. Run my earlier 5-TB-to-India example: on CloudFront that was ~$450. On Bunny’s Volume network — 5 TB flat at $0.005 — it’s about $25. Even on the pricier Standard network you’re looking at ~$150. Same files, same users, a fraction of the bill — and you never had to create an AWS account, tag a resource, or open a cost dashboard.

Cloudflare goes even further on the one axis CloudFront taxes hardest: its free plan serves unmetered CDN bandwidth. Egress on cached content is genuinely $0, forever, at any volume. I don’t personally live in the Cloudflare ecosystem — I find it heavier than I need — but for a founder whose entire fear is the bandwidth bill, “unlimited free egress” is an unbeatable sentence. And if you need object storage to go with it, Cloudflare R2 is zero-egress too. There’s also KeyCDN if you want another lean pay-as-you-go option, and DigitalOcean Spaces if you like storage and CDN in one flat $5 box.

The point isn’t that CloudFront is bad software. It’s excellent software. The point is that it’s priced for a company with a finance team, and its regional model happens to charge the most to exactly the bootstrappers who can least afford it. When a competitor knows Bunny exists and you don’t, they can serve the same global traffic at a tenth of your cost and undercut you into the ground. That’s the edge — and it’s why I keep AWS on the “just don’t” list for people who are still broke.

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The Bottom Line

AWS CloudFront pricing in 2026 is a story of one great number and a pile of sneaky ones. The great number is the free tier: 1 TB out and 10 million requests every month, permanently, with no catch. If your project lives inside that, use CloudFront and pay nothing — I mean it.

But the second you cross it, you’re back in AWS’s world: per-gigabyte transfer that costs more the further your users are from America, per-request fees that stack, and a meter with no ceiling. The new flat-rate plans blunt the anxiety but hide their own edges — a “Free” plan stingier than the real free tier, and a “no overage” promise that pays itself back in slower page loads.

For a bootstrapper serving files to the public internet, the honest answer is the same as it’s been on this whole site: put a flat, cheap CDN in front and refuse to play the regional-tax game. Bunny for a dollar a month, Cloudflare for free egress. Save CloudFront for the day you have an enterprise contract and someone else’s money to spend on the bandwidth. (If you’re still assembling the whole lean stack from scratch, the broke solopreneur’s survival guide is the bigger picture.)

This is the Broken Engineer Guide — I over-engineer everything, fail at business, and read the regional pricing table so you don’t get taxed for living in the wrong country. Go build something, and keep your CDN bill boring.