Bunny.net vs CloudFront used to be a one-line answer: bunny.net was several times cheaper per gigabyte, so you paid the AWS premium only for AWS integration. CloudFront’s flat-rate plans, launched in November 2025, changed the arithmetic for one common case. For a single site inside the plan allowances, the price gap can close entirely and CloudFront adds WAF and DNS to the bill. Outside that case, bunny’s rate card still wins.
Side by side
Positioning. bunny.net: a delivery-first network that sells bytes from a public rate card, with storage, video, image optimisation, a WAF and edge scripting attached. CloudFront: the AWS edge, built to sit in front of S3, load balancers and Lambda, sold either metered or, since late 2025, as a monthly bundle.
Pricing posture. bunny.net’s documentation prices its standard network at one cent per gigabyte for European and North American traffic, three cents for Asia-Pacific, four and a half for South America and six for Africa and the Middle East, with a $1 monthly minimum and no request fees; a separate volume network with fewer locations starts at $0.005/GB. CloudFront’s metered price there opens at $0.085/GB on the first 10 TB tier, plus $0.01 per 10,000 HTTPS requests, after a permanent free allowance of 1 TB and 10 million requests a month. AWS’s flat-rate plan documentation lists Free, Pro at $15, Business at $200 and Premium at $1,000 a month.
Where bunny.net is strong
- A rate card you can model without a sales call, and no per-request charge.
- Region-level billing: disable a costly region and stop paying for it.
- Any number of domains on one account, each just another pull zone.
- Bulk delivery at half a cent per gigabyte on the volume network for video and downloads.
Worth considering: the sticker is the cheap-region rate, and Bunny Shield covers the common attacks rather than replacing a full WAAP product.
Where CloudFront is strong
- Fetches from AWS origins such as S3 cost nothing in transfer, so the origin bill largely disappears.
- Flat-rate plans bundle AWS WAF, DDoS protection, bot controls, Route 53 DNS and a certificate into one price.
- Two tiers of edge code (CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge), IAM, CloudWatch and Terraform: one control plane with the rest of the stack.
- AWS cites over 400 edge locations backed by 13 regional caches.
Worth considering: each flat-rate plan covers one distribution and one apex domain, so a portfolio of sites buys a portfolio of plans.
The pricing reality
Take 20 TB a month to European and North American users with 60 million requests. On bunny’s standard network that is about $200. Pay-as-you-go CloudFront is roughly $1,570 in transfer and $50 in requests after the free allowance, roughly eight times more. The Business flat-rate plan is $200, and AWS says its paid tiers cover up to 50 TB with 125 million requests on Business. For one site that fits, CloudFront now matches the price and adds the security stack.
The picture flips at 200 TB of video, a dozen domains, or an origin outside AWS. Bunny’s volume network bills about $1,000 for that video, while CloudFront’s metered tiers stay several times higher and the plans multiply by domain. Model your own month with our CDN cost method before trusting either sticker.
How to decide
Ask three questions. Does the origin live in AWS? Is it one site or many? Is the traffic mostly web pages or bulk bytes? AWS origin, one site and web traffic points to a CloudFront plan. A non-AWS origin, many sites or bulk delivery points to bunny. For a programmable edge instead, see bunny.net vs Fastly.
The honest verdict
Choose CloudFront if: your origin is already in AWS, you run one site inside a flat-rate plan’s allowance, and you want WAF and DNS on the same invoice. Choose bunny.net if: you ship video, downloads or many domains, serve from outside AWS, or want a per-byte bill you can predict from a spreadsheet. Where the answer is close, run both on real traffic for two weeks using a fair benchmark.
Want your own traffic priced on both, plans included? The assessment does the sums for you.