Once a year we publish what the market actually paid, as opposed to what rate cards proposed. The 2026 read: commodity delivery kept getting cheaper, and everything attached to it did not.
Delivery: the deflation continued
Committed-volume rates for standard delivery drifted down again this year across mature regions, with well-bought contracts at meaningful volume clearing between $0.009 and $0.035 per GB depending on tier. Capacity growth and channel competition did the work; buyers who renewed without benchmarking largely missed it. The gap between proposed and cleared is the entire reason this index exists: rate cards are press releases, settlements are data.
The attach lines went the other way
Security, bot management and edge compute pricing firmed, providers rebuilding on the attach what they conceded on the commodity. The gap between a shopped and unshopped security line widened accordingly, which makes the renewal chapters of this blog more valuable this year, not less. The buyers who missed the drift share a trait: renewal treated as an administrative event rather than a market event, which in a deflating market is a quiet annual donation to the vendor.
Methodology, briefly, because an index is only as honest as its inputs: the figures aggregate rate cards on file, channel tiers we transact at, and anonymized settlements from assessments across the year, weighted toward deals closed in the trailing twelve months. No single client’s terms are recoverable from the aggregate, and vendors do not preview the read. We publish the shape rather than a false-precision decimal because market ranges are real and point estimates in negotiated markets are theater. Buyers should demand the same honesty from any benchmark they are shown, including ours.
What to expect into 2027
More of the same shape: delivery as commodity, differentiation and margin migrating to the attach lines and to regional strength. Buyers should benchmark annually, structure contracts to step with volume, and treat every bundled security quote as the opening bid it is. The attach-line inflation also changes what a good deal looks like: a flat total that hides delivery savings funding security padding is this year’s most common disguise.
In practice
Recalibrate annually with three numbers: your effective delivery rate, the current cleared range at your volume, and your security line benchmarked standalone. If your delivery rate has not fallen in a deflating year, the market moved and your contract did not. Bring the three numbers to every renewal, and the index stops being our publication and starts being your position.
The full index lives inside every assessment, current to the month, benchmarked at your volume rather than the market’s.