Cloudflare vs Fastly: Flat $25–$250 Unmetered Tiers vs $120–$280/TB Usage Egress

The fundamental financial divide between Cloudflare and Fastly is how each vendor meters data transfer. Cloudflare prices by domain zone—charging a flat $25/month for Pro and $250/month for Business—with zero per-gigabyte fees for standard HTML, CSS, JS, and image assets. Fastly operates like a utility meter: after a 100 GB free developer allowance, its Pay-As-You-Go plan enforces a $50/month floor and bills $0.12/GB ($120/TB) in North America and Europe, $0.19/GB in APAC/LATAM, and $0.28/GB ($280/TB) in South Korea and India.

Running the exact trajectory math reveals how quickly usage billing compounds. Factoring in Fastly's 100 GB free tier, Cloudflare Pro ($25/mo) becomes cheaper at just 308 GB of NA/EU traffic, while Cloudflare Business ($250/mo) breaks even at 2.18 TB/month (or just 992 GB/month if your users are in Seoul or Mumbai at $0.28/GB). At 10 TB of monthly NA/EU traffic and 100 million requests, Fastly costs roughly $1,275/month on list rates compared to $250/month on Cloudflare Business—an annual savings of $12,300 before negotiating enterprise commits.

In 2026, aggressive LLM web crawlers and automated credential-stuffing bots account for 30% to 50% of raw HTTP volume on public sites. On Fastly's usage-based model, every unblocked AI scraper request that misses your origin shield or pulls cached HTML directly inflates your monthly bill at $0.12–$0.28/GB plus $0.0075–$0.016 per 10,000 requests. Furthermore, unlocking Fastly's Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF and dedicated AI Bot Management requires moving onto bundled enterprise packages starting at $1,500/month, while its edge AI Runtime Control bills $2.50 down to $1.75 per 10,000 requests after the first 100k.

Cloudflare absorbs the bandwidth shock of bot waves by default. Even on the $0 Free and $25 Pro tiers, Cloudflare includes one-click AI scraper blocking, automated robots.txt enforcement, and AI Labyrinth—a honeypot system that traps non-compliant AI crawlers in infinite maze pages of synthetic content without charging you egress fees. Be aware of Cloudflare's own upsell wall, however: if you need granular ML bot scores (1–99) or custom session-level bot heuristics beyond Super Bot Fight Mode, Cloudflare requires an Enterprise contract typically starting at $5,000+/month.

Why do engineering-heavy platforms like GitHub, Reddit, and Stripe still pay Fastly's usage rates? The answer lies in cache determinism and purge speed. Fastly builds on massive, high-memory Varnish POPs rather than thousands of micro-nodes. Using Surrogate-Key headers, Fastly can invalidate millions of interdependent API responses globally in 150 milliseconds, whereas Cloudflare cache tag purges can take several hundred milliseconds to a few seconds to propagate across 330+ cities. Fastly also exposes raw VCL and sub-35-microsecond WebAssembly (Compute@Edge), allowing teams to write complex request coalescing and origin-shielding logic that keeps origin database load near zero.

Furthermore, buyers must audit Cloudflare's Self-Serve Subscription Agreement (Section 2.8). Cloudflare's unmetered CDN is strictly scoped to web pages and supporting assets; using a $25 Pro or $250 Business zone primarily to distribute terabytes of raw MP4 video, game installers, or software ISOs can trigger bandwidth throttling or forced migration to Enterprise unless you store those files on Cloudflare R2 ($0.015/GB-month storage, $0 egress) or Cloudflare Stream. Fastly places zero restrictions on file types—as long as you pay the per-GB rate, you can push petabytes of binary payloads without compliance friction.