Fastly Pricing Plans & Tiers

Fastly's pricing model reveals the economics of premium edge infrastructure. The free tier with unlimited features (CDN, DDoS protection, image optimization, semantic caching) is designed as a lead magnet for developers, with the expectation that production deployments graduate to the Basic tier at $1,500/month (or $125/year, suggesting an annual commitment discount). This tier includes only 100M requests per month, implying approximately $0.015 per million requests above the monthly minimum—comparable to Cloudflare's premium pricing but without the self-serve free tier upsell funnel.

Fastly's Basic tier includes 30M image requests per month, suggesting that image optimization is a revenue driver separate from CDN delivery. The bundling of image requests alongside general requests and TLS domains signals that Fastly views origin optimization as a differentiated feature worth metering, unlike Cloudflare which bundles image optimization into the free tier. This creates friction for image-heavy deployments, which must negotiate higher tiers.

Fastly's $1,500/month minimum for production usage is 10-50x higher than Bunny ($10/mo), Cloudflare ($20/mo), or KeyCDN ($4/mo), positioning Fastly as a premium service for high-traffic enterprises and financial institutions with no alternative to DDoS protection and TLS distribution scale. The pricing is not competitive on cost per unit; it is competitive on engineering depth, which justifies the premium to security-conscious Fortune 500 companies.