Who genuinely delivers below $0.01/GB in 2026, what the flat-rate insurgents trade away, and how to buy at the floor without buying a problem.
Winner depends on your workload.
Winner depends on: how much platform you can give up. BlazingCDN's flat $2.50–5/TB and 5centsCDN's entry rates are the floor; Bunny's volume tier (~$0.005/GB) buys the floor plus a real platform; everything under a cent shares the same trade — thinner feature surfaces and support benches than the majors, which is fine exactly as often as your requirements are simple.
The floor is real, and it moved again
A decade of falling per-GB rates has produced a genuine sub-cent tier: published, no-negotiation prices below $0.01/GB for delivery that would have cost eight times that on a major's rate card. In 2026 the floor sits around a quarter of a cent — BlazingCDN's flat-rate tiers run roughly $2.50–5 per TB, 5centsCDN's standard NA/EU plans start near $2.50/TB — with Bunny's Volume tier (about $0.005/GB for high usage) as the most platform-complete resident of the neighborhood. The question is never whether these prices are real; it is what they are prices for.
| Provider | Published shape | What defines it |
|---|---|---|
| BlazingCDN | Flat, region-agnostic tiers from ~$5 down to ~$2.50/TB at volume | Aggressive flat-rate positioning aimed squarely at bandwidth-heavy workloads; 14-day no-card trial |
| 5centsCDN | Standard plans from ~$2.50/TB (NA/EU), pricier worldwide tiers | Streaming-oriented value house; the name is the strategy |
| Bunny.net (Volume) | ~$0.005/GB volume network; Standard tier from $0.01/GB NA/EU | The sub-cent option that keeps a full platform — shield, rules, token auth, optimizer — attached |
| Gcore / CDN77 / KeyCDN | Above the line at list ($0.04–0.05/GB region-dependent starts) but negotiable toward it at volume | The honest adjacent tier: not sub-cent on paper, often close in practice at commitment |
What a quarter-cent buys, and doesn't
At this tier you are buying bytes moved competently: solid POP footprints in EU/NA, HTTPS included rather than surcharged, and consoles that do the basics. What you are structurally not buying: deep WAF and bot stacks, broad edge-compute platforms, enterprise support benches, and the long tail of delivery features the majors accumulated over decades — the difference in kind we scored across Bunny vs BlazingCDN. None of that is a criticism; it is the business model. Sub-cent pricing exists because the product is deliberately narrower, and the buyers it fits — software distribution, VOD libraries, game patches, large static assets — genuinely do not need the width.
The diligence the price demands
Cheap bandwidth deserves the same four tests as expensive bandwidth, plus two more. The standard four: RUM latency in your geographies, purge-to-effect time, log delivery, and a support ticket at an awkward hour — the trial plan from our trials comparison applies unchanged. The two extras this tier earns: capacity honesty (ask how the network behaves at your peak concurrency, and test a burst if you can — thin networks degrade at exactly the moments that matter) and commercial durability (an aggressive price is a bet on the operator's cost base; the mid-market has watched aggressive players exit before, and your migration plan is part of the purchase).
How to use the floor intelligently
Three patterns work well. Whole-estate for simple workloads: if your delivery is static and your geography EU/NA-weighted, the floor tier can simply be your CDN. Traffic-splitting: heavy, cache-friendly paths (downloads, media) on the budget network, dynamic and security-sensitive paths on a major — the split most mid-size estates should at least price. And leverage: a genuine sub-cent quote in hand changes every renewal conversation with a major, whether or not you ever migrate a byte — the negotiating physics of list price vs street price. Facts and prices verified against provider documentation, July 2026.
Want the split-estate math run on your traffic — floor-tier bytes where they're safe, platform where it pays? Start with the assessment.