I've been screwed by all three providers. Here's exactly how each one will rob you blind:
Cloudflare: "Unlimited" Until It Isn't
Cloudflare's pricing looks decent on paper - Pro plan is around $20-25/month for "unlimited" everything. The reality? Their "unlimited" has fine print that'll bite you as outlined in their Terms of Service.
Current Cloudflare pricing (check their site - rates change):
- Free Plan: Actually decent for small sites, includes SSL certs and basic DDoS protection
- Pro Plan: Around $20-25/month - works fine until you need actual support
- Business Plan: Around $200-250/month - where they start caring about you
- Enterprise: Contact sales - where the real features live
Ran a SaaS on Cloudflare Pro for a while. The monthly bill was predictable until we had a traffic spike that brought us to their attention. Their "unlimited" plan suddenly wasn't so unlimited when we were serving video content - got a friendly email suggesting we upgrade to Business or they'd start throttling. Turns out their fair use policy has some vague limits they don't advertise much.
The gotcha: All the useful features cost extra. Argo Smart Routing is $5/month minimum plus $0.10 per GB after 1GB. Load Balancing starts at $5/month but you need multiple origins to make it worthwhile. Workers for edge computing costs $5/month plus execution time.
Pro tip: Cloudflare's free plan is actually solid for static sites. Their paid plans are good for predictable costs, terrible for getting help when things break. Had a caching issue that took down our API for 2 hours - Pro support took 36 hours to respond with "have you tried turning it off and on again?"
AWS CloudFront: Death by a Thousand Cuts
AWS CloudFront pricing looks cheap until you actually use it. No monthly fee sounds great, but Amazon designed their billing to extract maximum revenue from every byte as detailed in their CloudFront pricing calculator.
Real AWS CloudFront pricing:
- Free Tier: 1TB data transfer + 10M requests monthly - actually forever free, which is nice
- Data Transfer: $0.085/GB in North America, scales down to $0.020/GB over 5PB
- Request Fees: $0.0075 per 10,000 HTTP requests, $0.010 per 10,000 HTTPS requests
- Regional pricing bullshit: Africa costs 3x more because reasons, Asia costs 40% more for geography
Here's how AWS got me: Started with what looked like reasonable costs for image hosting. Base data transfer was maybe $40-something per month. Then I needed SSL certificates and ended up with dedicated IPs that cost way more than expected. Added Lambda@Edge for image processing (which has shit cold start times of 200-300ms), Origin Shield to reduce origin hits, and real-time logs for debugging because CloudWatch was useless.
My bill exploded - went from like $40-something to over $800. Maybe closer to $850? Either way, way too fucking much in one month because AWS charges separately for everything. Cache invalidation costs money after the first batch. Monitoring costs extra. Geographic restrictions? That'll be more money please.
The enterprise "discounts" are bullshit too. You need to commit to 10TB+/month minimum and sign an annual contract to get 30-60% off. If you don't hit your commitment, you pay anyway.
Fastly: Expensive But Actually Works
Fastly's pricing is 2x-3x more expensive than everyone else, but here's the thing - their shit actually works when you need it to. Check their status page - they're transparent about uptime.
Current Fastly pricing:
- Free Tier: $50/month credit - about 400GB in North America
- Usage Tier: $50/month minimum + usage charges detailed in their pricing guide
- Packages: Start at $1,500/month for "basic" enterprise features
- Data Transfer: Around 12 cents/GB (North America), 19 cents/GB (Asia), 28 cents/GB (India/Africa)
Moved to Fastly after CloudFront had issues during traffic spikes. Yeah, it costs more - roughly 40-50% higher than AWS for the same bandwidth. But when we got featured somewhere and traffic spiked hard, Fastly actually handled it without falling over like CloudFront did.
The real value is in their edge compute platform. You can run actual JavaScript at their CDN nodes for personalization, A/B testing, or API routing. This shit would be impossible on CloudFront without Lambda@Edge (which costs a fortune and has terrible cold start times).
Fastly's instant cache purging actually works - 150ms globally. CloudFront takes 10-15 minutes. When you push a critical bug fix and need it live immediately, that difference matters more than the 40% price premium.
Their support doesn't suck either. When I had issues with image optimization breaking mobile layouts, I got a real engineer on Slack within 30 minutes who actually fixed the problem instead of telling me to "check the documentation." First time in my career CDN support actually helped instead of made things worse.
