How I Found a CDN That's Better Than Cloudflare: The Bunny Story

How I Found a CDN That’s Better (and Cheaper) Than Cloudflare: The Bunny Story

In 2025, I stumbled upon a project that genuinely made my day. At the time, I was heavy into Vercel, and if you’ve read my previous posts, you know I’m an optimization-obsessed person. I try to squeeze every dollar. Being an engineer first and a (failed) entrepreneur second means I compulsively optimize spending before a product even earns a single rupee. That’s how the Broken Engineer Guide lives.

Let me tell you how this particular rabbit hole started. I was building something on Vercel, and a thought kept haunting me: even a 1 MB or 10 MB video served through Vercel could blow up my bandwidth costs. My entire focus was to stay on that free plan as long as humanly possible — in fact, until I actually made money. $20 a month? I didn’t want to pay it.

So I needed a CDN to put in front of Vercel, something to shield me from those egress costs. Around that time, I came across a Medium post by someone who had built a Chrome extension. Whenever a user installed that extension, it downloaded a JSON file — around 500 to 700 KB, totally dynamic, couldn’t be cached. As his user base grew, his Vercel usage shot up, and he was about to be forced onto the $20 plan, just like I dreaded. His solution? Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a giant, no doubt. Enterprise-grade, increasingly catering to solopreneurs and small teams. I like them. But I don’t use them, because I found something that, for me, is an even better version of Cloudflare. That thing is Bunny.net.

See, 90% of small companies that use Cloudflare use it for the CDN — not for deployment, not for workers, just the CDN. And there is actually a much cheaper, equally powerful alternative. Bunny.net is an award-winning global edge platform with over 1.5 million websites running on it and around 120 PoPs (points of presence). The whole logic of a CDN is that your static files live physically close to your users. If I’m in Mumbai and my data is served from a node in Mumbai or Pune, it’s lightning fast. CDNs are as old as the internet itself, because the problem of latency started the second the internet was born.

Bunny is a European company. That means GDPR compliance by default, which is a weight off my shoulders. But that’s just the beginning. We’re going to explore not only their CDN but a whole ecosystem that, honestly, surprised me.

The CDN That Got Me Hooked

The first thing you encounter is Pull Zones. You create a pull zone, attach a custom domain, and Bunny automatically provisions TLS/SSL certificates. You never have to think about certificate renewal. One thing Bunny absolutely nailed — and this was a game changer before Vercel finally caught up in 2025 — is unlimited custom domains at no extra cost. Let that sink in.

Imagine you have a thousand clients, and each wants to attach their own domain or subdomain for something like a status page (e.g., status.clientdomain.com). Vercel historically wasn’t the place for that. With Bunny, you can attach thousands of subdomains, all free, with their advanced API. I’ve used their APIs extensively, and they’re beautifully documented. If custom domain requirements are forcing you to look beyond Vercel, or if you just need a CDN layer in front, Bunny is the answer. (I broke down the full bring-your-own-domain setup — Vercel, Bunny, and Cloudflare compared — in the custom domains guide.)

Cloudflare? They offer custom domains only for enterprise plans. They’ll make you pay. But we don’t want to pay. Bunny has a minimum monthly plan of one dollar. One. Dollar.

Storage That’s Also a CDN

Bunny isn’t just a CDN; it’s also a storage platform. And it’s one of the fastest cloud storage options I’ve used. You can store videos, photos, files — and have them served instantly via the CDN, no separate S3 bucket needed. In AWS terms, you’re getting S3 + CloudFront in a single product — minus the egress fees that make Azure Blob and S3 storage quietly expensive. Video streaming, in particular, is a core product for them because videos are large and bandwidth-hungry. They offer a dedicated streaming product that I haven’t even fully explored yet, but it exists and is growing.

Edge Scripting: Goodbye, Expensive Vercel Functions

About a year ago, Bunny got ambitious and launched edge scripting. Here’s why that matters: When you use Vercel, you often rely on Vercel functions for APIs or tiny bits of serverless logic. But that gets costly fast, and Vercel keeps changing their pricing. Worse, there are very few guardrails. I’ve seen projects where a single function gets called 10 million times a month, eating up 70% of the API usage (a runaway function like that is exactly why you cap your Vercel spend). If you just move that one function off Vercel, you can slash your function cost by 80%. The remaining lightweight calls? Vercel is fine for those. (For where to actually host all of this without a surprise bill, here’s my full deployment tier list.)

Bunny’s edge scripting is like AWS Lambda, but running on their edge network. You can write a function, deploy it globally, and pay a fraction of what Vercel charges. For the broken entrepreneur trying to survive on a free tier, that’s a lifesaver.

Databases, Containers, and More — Wait, What?

Bunny is quietly building out a full platform. They’ve announced an SQLite-compatible database, powered under the hood by Turso. So soon you’ll be able to have a proper database right next to your CDN and storage, on-demand, without leaving the Bunny ecosystem. (I go deep on Turso and the whole per-user database idea in the advanced database guide.) They’re also working on Magic Containers — the ability to spin up EC2-like instances all over the world. That’s still very early, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

There’s also a Security Shield as part of the CDN offering — a genuinely usable WAF that starts free, which matters when you see what AWS WAF costs for the same job — powerful image processing and optimization (which can speed up your entire site for about $10/month), and DNS routing. The DNS part is a bit technical, but if you’ve ever dealt with custom domains behind a CDN, you’ll appreciate how smoothly it works.

How I Actually Use Bunny

I personally use Bunny for two main things: CDN and Storage. That’s it. And for those two things alone, it’s become indispensable. The dashboard feels fresh, the pricing is the cheapest I’ve seen anywhere, and the team is a tiny 24–30 people — not a massive faceless corporation. They’ve held conferences, they do webinars, and there’s a real energy behind the product.

Why I’m Telling You This

You might wonder why I’m writing this blog, why I’m explaining so many tools. Here’s the truth: you need to know these tools exist so you can make sensible decisions. Knowledge is power. If you only know the big names, you’re limited by your knowledge. Your competitor might be charging $99 a month for something you could deliver at $10 a month, with a 90% profit margin, simply because you picked the right underlying tech. That’s the edge.

There’s also Supabase, which plenty of people love. It bundles a lot out-of-the-box. I haven’t used it much because I’m comfortable with my own stack, but I’ve got nothing against them. They’re funded, they have a big team, and they’re good for non-engineers who need batteries included. But if you’re like me — an optimization-obsessed engineer who’d rather assemble exactly what you need — then tools like Bunny are pure gold.

So try bunny.net. You’ll like the theme, the energy, and the stability. Over 1.5 million websites trust them, and they’re pretty damn stable. From a dollar a month, you can start slashing costs and building something that actually scales without the anxiety of a surprise bill.

Stay hungry, keep optimizing, and never stop exploring cheaper, faster, better ways to build.

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This is part of my ongoing series where I over-engineer everything in public, hoping you learn something along the way. Subscribe or follow along — next time, maybe we’ll finally launch that product.