BlazingCDN vs Amazon CloudFront
Both networks put your files close to your users. CloudFront now sells that two different ways, and the two prices tell very different stories.
Our rate is printed on the pricing page. You can check it before you talk to anyone.
CloudFront publishes a pay as you go rate and a set of flat plans. At 200 TB those are $11,965 and $3,500. The same 200 TB is $765 here. Below about 46 TB their flat plans win, and we say so again further down.
Or open the full pricing table and read the rate yourself.
Which one actually fits your traffic
We would rather lose the click than lose a month of your team’s time. Here is the honest split.
Pick BlazingCDN if
- You move video, game builds, updates or other large files
- Terabytes drive your bill, not the number of requests
- You want one rate across our regions, with no geo multipliers
- You want a rate rather than an allowance, with nothing to outgrow
- You are adding a second CDN next to the one you already run
Pick Amazon CloudFront if
- You move under about 46 TB a month, where their flat plans beat our metered rate outright
- Your request count fits the allowance: 10M on Pro, 125M on Business
- You are already deep in AWS and procurement is done
- You want WAF, DDoS, DNS and edge compute bundled into one monthly price
Side by side
Pricing model
Per terabyte delivered
Per GB pay as you go, or a flat monthly plan with a usage allowance
Published price
Yes. $5 down to $2.50 per TB in progressive tiers, the full table printed on the pricing page
Yes, both are published: pay as you go from $0.085 per GB, and flat plans from $0 to $10,000 a month
Regional pricing
One rate across our regions
One rate across the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe; other regions cost more
Heavy video and large files
What the network is built and priced for
No video product. CloudFront delivers; encoding is MediaConvert, billed separately
Time to a number
Same day, by email
Also published, with a calculator. This one is a draw
What happens when you outgrow a CloudFront plan
This is not our characterisation of their product. It is their own developer guide, on the page that describes the flat-rate pricing plans.
“If you continue to substantially exceed your plan’s usage allowance without upgrading, we may adjust how we deliver your traffic. For example, we might serve your traffic from fewer or more distant edge locations or adjust performance.”
Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide, flat-rate pricing plans. Checked 28 August 2026. Read it on their site
What it means in practice
Be fair about what this says. AWS states that most customers never experience an adjustment, that a first spike up to three times the allowance is accommodated, that excess is judged over two to three months, and that upgrading restores full performance. The clause is about sustained excess, not a bad week. But it is still the mechanism: the bill stays flat and the delivery is what moves. On a CDN that is the one line item you cannot afford to have managed for you.
Why we have no allowance at all
There is no allowance to exceed here, so there is nothing to adjust. You are billed for the terabytes you delivered, at the tier your volume reached, and the delivery is the same at 5 TB and at 5 PB. See Video CDN, HLS Streaming CDN and Anycast CDN.
Tell us your monthly terabytes. We send back the number.
No account needed to get a price. One email, one answer.
Speed tests look similar on both networks. The invoice does not. Here is the same traffic, priced two ways.
200 TB a month, billed across progressive tiers from $5 down to $2.50 per TB. No platform fee, no allowance, no contract. The whole table is printed on the pricing page.
The same 200 TB on their Premium plan, which is their cheapest published route at this volume. On pay as you go it is $11,965. Past 50 TB the Business allowance is gone and Premium starts at $1,000.
Run your own volume through it
50 TB a month
$4.30 a terabyte effective. This is the one volume where they win: their Pro plan is $15 and Business $200 for the same 50 TB, so if your request count fits inside 10M or 125M, buy theirs. Pay as you go here would be $3,965.
200 TB a month
Where most video and software teams sit. $3.83 a terabyte effective. CloudFront pay as you go is $11,965 here; their Premium plan at this size is $3,500.
1 PB a month
1,000 TB billed down through the tiers, $3.32 a terabyte effective. CloudFront pay as you go is $38,965, and their flat plans stop at 600 TB, so past that you are back to asking for a quote.
Our pricing is progressive, like tax brackets: $5 on the first 5 TB, stepping down to $2.50 above 1,000 TB. CloudFront figures are calculated from their published US and Europe pay-as-you-go rates and their published flat-rate plan prices, data transfer only, checked 28 August 2026. Requests, invalidations and Origin Shield are extra on pay as you go.
Data transfer is not the whole bill
200 TB a month, with every line the meter counts. Requests are the item most people leave out of the estimate, and on CloudFront they are billed separately on pay as you go. Worked at an average object of 200 KB, a normal mixed workload, which makes one billion requests.
Data transfer
$765
$3,500 flat, 200 TB allowance
$11,965
Requests
1 billion
Not billed at all. We charge for delivered terabytes, never for requests
Inside the 2 billion allowance at this tier
$990, at $0.0100 per 10,000 HTTPS requests after the first 10 million
Cache invalidation
5,000 paths
Not billed. Purge by path, in bulk or total, plus cache warm-up through the API
$20, first 1,000 paths free then $0.005 each
$20, same rate
Logs and metrics
Metrics not billed. A Prometheus endpoint on every account; raw JSON logs as a $50 a month add-on
CloudWatch Logs ingestion included in the plan
S3 or CloudWatch charges for standard logs, Kinesis for real-time
Total for the month
$765
$3,520
4.6x
$12,975
17.0x
Requests scale with how small your files are, not with how many terabytes you move. At 4 MB video segments the same 200 TB is only about 52 million requests and the request line nearly disappears; at 50 KB web assets it is four billion and it dominates the bill. That is the number to work out before you pick a model. Figures from the published CloudFront pay-as-you-go rates and flat-rate plan allowances, data transfer for the US and Europe, checked 28 August 2026.
The three questions everyone asks next
Cheaper means slower, right?
Test it on your own files instead of taking our word for it. Point one pull zone at us, compare, keep whichever wins. Our own numbers are on Performance Metrics.
Do I have to move everything?
No. Most teams move the heavy traffic first, video, builds and downloads, and leave the rest where it is.
What about my AWS setup?
Keep it. Your origin stays in S3 or on your own servers, IAM and your pipelines do not move, and teams run us alongside CloudFront by splitting traffic by workload rather than replacing anything.
Keep it. Move the heavy traffic to us.
You do not have to leave AWS. Keep your origins, your IAM and your tooling where they are, and point the terabytes that actually cost money at a network priced for them.
- One pull zone, pointed at the origin you already use
- From $5 down to $2.50 per TB, published, no negotiation to see it
- Roll back by changing one CNAME if you do not like the result
Get your rate
Four fields. We reply with a written price for your volume, usually the same day.
We use this only to price your traffic and reply to you.
Splitting the traffic takes an afternoon
Create a pull zone
Point it at the same S3 bucket or origin CloudFront already pulls from. Nothing changes on your side.
Move the heavy paths
Video segments, installers, patches, archives. The paths that generate the terabytes on your invoice.
Compare one invoice
One billing cycle is enough to see the difference. If it is not better, change the CNAME back.
What the plan costs, and what it buys
We sell a rate. They sell either a meter or an allowance, and each gets expensive in its own way.
Where you start
$5 per TB delivered, pay as you go, with a $25 monthly minimum
Two different free tiers: pay as you go includes 1 TB and 10M requests every month, and the flat Free plan covers 100 GB and 1M requests. Then Pro at $15 a month, which also carries a 50 TB allowance but only 10M requests
Mid tier
The same tier table. Your rate steps down as volume grows, with nothing to re-sign
Business at $200 a month for the same 50 TB, but with 125M requests, plus WAF, DDoS, DNS and edge compute bundled in
The tier that carries heavy traffic
$2.50 per TB on the top tier, and no platform fee at any volume
Premium from $1,000 a month. 200 TB is $3,500, 350 TB is $6,000, 600 TB is $10,000. Above 600 TB, custom pricing
Commitment
None. Monthly, stop whenever you like
No annual commitment on the plans, and none on pay as you go either
What gets billed
Delivered traffic only. Pull cache volume is never billed
The plan fee. No overage charges, but sustained excess is handled by adjusting how your traffic is delivered
CloudFront figures are their published pay-as-you-go rates and flat-rate plan prices, checked 28 August 2026. Both models are public, which is why every number on this page is one you can verify rather than one you have to take from us.
CDN feature by feature
Static files, downloads, images and APIs. Everything on our side is taken from our own published feature list, and we have left in the rows where they are ahead.
Routing
Anycast with built in failover. 50+ signals weighed per request, routes re-evaluated in real time
DNS-based routing to 750+ edge locations, a far larger footprint than ours. Anycast static IPs are a $3,000 a month add-on, and not available on the flat plans
Cache control
TTL up to 365 days, a separate TTL per HTTP status code, minimum requests to cache from 1 to 10, inherit or ignore origin headers
Cache policies and TTL controls per behaviour
Per-path rules
Locations: a rule set matched to an HTTP route, so different parts of one resource get different delivery settings. Extension proxying, URL parameter truncation, HLS and DASH handling and image processing, all per path
CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge, plus cache policies and behaviours per path pattern
Purge
By path, in bulk, or total purge in one action. Plus cache warm-up through the API before a release
Invalidation by path or tag. First 1,000 a month free, then $0.005 each
Origin Shield
Included. Automatic, or pinned to a region you choose
Origin Shield, billed separately at $0.0075 per 10,000 requests in the US, more elsewhere, and Premium-only on the flat plans
Compression
gzip, Brotli and zstd. At the edge or at origin, with a separate cache per encoding
gzip and Brotli
Delivery speed control
A download speed cap you set per account, per domain or per URL, plus rate matched delivery so one big file does not take the whole pipe. Request intensity limits per client or subnet on top of that
No delivery speed control. Throttling means writing it yourself in a CloudFront Function or Lambda@Edge
Signed URLs
Validity window, signature bound to a client IP, a limit of 1 to 5 unique IPs per link, two secrets for rotation, partial path signing and URL encryption
Signed URLs and signed cookies, with a trusted key group
Country and IP lists
Country allowlist or blocklist, IP allowlist or blocklist with mask support, referrer allow and deny lists and cookie checks. Set per resource, with no security plan to buy
Geo restriction by country is built in; IP rules come from AWS WAF, billed separately unless you are on a flat plan
Security stack
Their round
Access control only, as in the two rows above. No WAF, no bot management, no Zero Trust, and we do not claim any
AWS WAF, Shield and bot management, bundled into the flat plans. This is a real reason to buy CloudFront
Certificates
Let’s Encrypt at no extra charge, renewed automatically. Upload your own, in bulk, auto-assigned to matching domains
Free certificates through ACM, and you can import your own
Origins and import
HTTP(S), S3, Swift, Wasabi and S3 compatible buckets, FTP, SFTP, rclone and rsync. Pull or push, pre-import or lazy, with a callback on the result
S3 with origin access control, Elemental MediaPackage, an Application Load Balancer, Lambda function URLs, VPC origins, or any custom HTTP origin
Image processing
One file at origin, every variant from a query string on your own domain. Variants are cached like any other file and cost nothing extra
No image processing. It is a Lambda@Edge or CloudFront Functions job you write and maintain
Logs and metrics
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account. Raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on
Standard logs to S3 or CloudWatch, and real-time logs to Kinesis, all billed separately
Running it from an agent
One MCP server, 52 typed tools: pull zones, cache and purge, metrics, domains and certificates, Cloud Storage and Video CDN. Read-only by default, with cache purge and warm-up; create and update are opt-in; deletes are a second opt-in limited to custom domains and Video CDN resources, and deleting pull zones, buckets or accounts is not implemented at all. Public on npm as @blazingcdn/mcp
Full API, CLI, CloudFormation and Terraform. AWS ships MCP servers for its own tooling, but none of them configures a CDN as a typed toolset the way ours does
Our column is taken from our own published feature list. The CloudFront column describes their publicly documented products and pricing, checked 28 August 2026. AWS also negotiates private pricing agreements at volume, so a large account will pay less than the list rates used here; we publish ours, theirs is what you negotiate. AWS changes this regularly, so check before you decide.
Six places where we win
Not opinions. Each of these is a line item you can check on an invoice or in a config screen.
$12,975 vs $765
The full bill at 200 TB, requests and invalidations included, on their published pay-as-you-go rates against ours. Their cheapest published route at that volume is the $3,500 Premium plan, still 4.6 times our $765.
No allowance to outgrow
Their flat plans have no overage charge, but their own guide says sustained excess may be handled by serving your traffic from fewer or more distant edge locations. We have no allowance, so there is nothing to adjust.
Cache is never billed
Pull cache is never billed. You pay for what left the edge, not for how much of your library is sitting on it. Permanently cached Video CDN files are the one exception, at $0.02 per GB a month after the first 500 GB.
Raw logs, no upsell
A Prometheus endpoint, Grafana, Alertmanager and OpenTelemetry on every account, raw JSON logs for Graylog or ELK as a $50 a month add-on. On CloudFront logs are a pipeline you assemble and pay for per destination, and real-time logs are not supported on the flat plans at all.
Links bound to a person
A signature can be tied to a client IP with a limit of 1 to 5 addresses, signed on part of the path, with the URL encrypted and two secrets you can rotate.
Knobs you do not have to code
Chunk length, keyframe alignment, pre-cached first chunks, millisecond clipping, track selection, and any origin from S3 to rsync. Delivery is the product, so it is all exposed.
And four places where they win
If any of these four is the reason you are shopping, buy CloudFront. We would rather you read this here than find it out in month two.
- You are inside AWS: IAM, S3, Lambda@Edge and one bill are worth real money to you.
- Security as a product: AWS WAF, Shield and bot management bundled into a flat plan. We do access control, not a security suite.
- Under a terabyte a month: their free tier covers 1 TB and 10M requests, every month. We start at a $25 minimum.
- A far larger edge footprint than ours, and HTTP/3. We serve HTTP, HTTPS and HTTP/2.
Comparing more than one? See also Cloudflare pricing, Google Cloud CDN pricing and Fastly pricing, or start from our CDN pricing comparison.