Introducing Flat Rate CDN

Over the past year, we have improved Vercel’s Pro pricing to better reflect how teams build, with expanded user roles, flexible credits, access to enterprise features, and more. But one area our customers continued to give us feedback on was CDN pricing.

CDN costs should be predictable, but viral launches, traffic bursts, or misconfigured routes sometimes turned an otherwise normal month into an unexpected bill. For teams building on Vercel, that uncertainty made growth feel like a problem at exactly the moment it should feel exciting.

Today, we are introducing Flat Rate CDN for Pro teams: a new way to pay for CDN usage with a predictable monthly bill, built-in spike protection, and service tiers designed for different traffic profiles.

“We enabled Flat Rate CDN around the same time we launched a TV campaign. Under the old model, we would have been closely monitoring CDN-related costs. With Flat Rate CDN, we no longer have to worry.”

Yasuyuki Matsumoto • Engineering Leader at Newt Travel↗(opens in new tab)

Copy link to headingWhat is Flat Rate CDN?

Flat Rate CDN is an alternative to usage-based CDN billing that provides you with a predictable monthly bill.

The model is designed around a simple idea: teams should be able to choose the CDN capacity that corresponds to their typical usage profile, pay a known amount monthly, and avoid surprise overages from temporary spikes.

Flat Rate CDN has several advantages over usage-based billing:

• Fixed monthly price: Pay a fixed amount for Vercel CDN each month.

• Covers traffic spikes: CDN Requests, Fast Data Transfer, and other resources are no longer billed directly, so spikes don't result in surprise bills.

• No overages: Your bill will never increase because of temporary usage spikes.

Importantly, predictable pricing does not mean lower-quality bandwidth. Every request still runs on Vercel’s premium network, including private fiber that routes around congestion on the public internet, which can improve performance by up to 60%. Comparable routing is often sold as a premium add-on, but Vercel includes it by default for Pro teams, and performance isn't degraded during traffic spikes.

Copy link to headingHow it works

All new Pro teams have Flat Rate CDN enabled by default, and existing Pro teams can opt in. Usage is tracked at the team level and covers all projects, so you no longer need to manage capacity for them individually.

Copy link to headingWhat’s included

On Flat Rate CDN, one fixed monthly fee covers:

• CDN Requests

• Fast Data Transfer

• Blob Data Transfer

• Observability events generated by CDN requests

The default tier is included with Pro. You can upgrade to a higher tier for increased request and data transfer capacity.

Your tier is fixed throughout any given billing period, so you never have to worry about charges from temporary traffic spikes.

Copy link to headingWhat happens during a spike

The following team had a relatively normal usage profile that would fit comfortably in our $20/month Flat Rate CDN tier:

Only days after the above period, they experienced a viral product launch that generated a significant surge in traffic:

If the team had been on usage-based pricing, their CDN bill would have reached tens of thousands of dollars. On Flat Rate CDN, it stayed at $20 for the month.

Copy link to headingNo caps and no performance hit

Flat rate pricing from other infrastructure providers often places caps on usage when you reach your capacity, resulting in rapid performance degradation and request rejection. Flat Rate CDN is different in two ways:

1. We recognize usage spikes and remove them when evaluating your CDN usage against capacity.

2. We rightsize your Flat Rate CDN tier every month based on sustained usage.

This means we’ll never bring down your site when you’re going viral, and you don’t have to actively manage your tier when you’re growing quickly.

You can still monitor every covered resource on the Usage page or in the CLI, including traffic spikes absorbed by Vercel:

Copy link to headingWhat we heard from customers during beta

Even though surprise bills are rare across our entire customer base, we’ve seen numerous stories from Pro customers about unexpected bills, many of which famously blew up on X. One team we interviewed was running hundreds of client sites and told us that CDN costs were “by far our largest line item, and the hardest to forecast,” especially when traffic spiked “from a client’s listing going viral, seasonal traffic, or bot traffic.”

In May, we released Flat Rate CDN to a small set of teams in limited beta. Over the last several months, it has changed how they operate on Vercel.

They worried less:

Flat Rate CDN eased our billing anxiety. With the recent increase in AI crawler traffic, we used to frequently check bot activity through Observability and monitor which bots were generating traffic. We now spend much less time doing that.

They built more:

Knowing that CDN usage is predictable makes us more willing to adopt caching-oriented approaches. We're now considering broader use of Cache Components and other caching strategies in our Next.js architecture, whereas previously we had to think more carefully about the potential cost impact of additional cache traffic.

This is exactly what we built Flat Rate CDN to do. No surprise bills, predictable pricing, and peace of mind to ship the next project.

Copy link to headingGet started

All new Pro teams have Flat Rate CDN enabled by default. Existing Pro teams can opt in to the new plan:

1. Select Billing in the navigation.

2. Browse to Flat Rate CDN and toggle the setting to on.

3. Choose a capacity tier that corresponds to your typical usage.

4. Review your selection, which will show subscription costs if you chose a paid Flat Rate CDN tier.

5. Select Enable to apply.

Learn more about Flat Rate CDN pricing in the documentation.

Copy link to headingFAQ