Latency can kill your business.

Users and customers won’t stick around if they have to wait several seconds for their actions to have any effect or for webpages to load. They need responsive apps and sites in order to keep them coming back.

That’s why you need to know the ins and outs of AWS CloudFront pricing.

With CloudFront being one of the best CDN options on the market (especially for reducing latency), you need to know just how much it will cost you to deploy for your organization, whether the results will be worth it, and how to reduce your costs as much as possible.

That’s why this post will cover:

• What is AWS CloudFront?
• AWS CloudFront pricing
• How to crush and consolidate your AWS bills

Let’s get started.

What is AWS CloudFront?

Chances are you’ve heard of what Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) CloudFront product is, if you’re not using it already. If not, you’re almost certainly familiar with its current main competitor, Cloudflare.

AWS CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) designed to mirror your content across the AWS infrastructure in order to deliver it to your users with the lowest latency possible.

That was a bit of a mouthful, so let’s break it down.

Let’s say that you’re running a blog where you review the latest cameras and photography software, accessories, techniques, trends, and so on. It’s highly successful, brings a lot of business to you via sponsorships, partnerships, and free product samples, and generates a chunk of your revenue through affiliate links.

Your content is read and trusted across the globe, and this website is your livelihood, so you know that you need to deliver your content to readers with as little latency as possible. The higher your load times, the higher your bounce rate, after all.

Now picture yourself as a SaaS app founder. Users are constantly making tweaks to their documents on your servers and you need every advantage to stay ahead of your competitors. You’re scaling fast, and your onsite infrastructure is starting to strain under the load of so many new users connecting and being active at once.

Both of these examples and many others are great instances where AWS CloudFront can solve your problems by providing your content to users with the lowest possible latency. They can then browse your blog or use your SaaS app without any delays to their actions or frustrating loading times that are longer than they need to be.

CloudFront does this by copying and caching your data to multiple edge locations within its network. Then, when the content is requested by a user, it calculates which edge location would provide them with the lowest latency, and sends the data from there instead of from its original source.

After setting up where the data should be originally copied from, CloudFront can thus take care of annoying load times for your users and reduce the overall load on your existing infrastructure. Remember that users are getting their data from AWS CloudFront’s network through this setup, so the only requests being sent to you are those from new edge locations which would provide users with lower latency, or those associated with updating the data they’re providing users.

AWS CloudFront pricing

Part of the reason that CloudFront has been able to take such a dominant portion of the market to compete with the titan that is Cloudflare is that it has a very reasonable pricing plan. AWS CloudFront pricing points are comparable to Cloudflare first and foremost in its free tier.

AWS CloudFront pricing: Free tier

The free tier of AWS CloudFront allows for:

• Up to 1TB of data transfer out per month
• 10,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS Requests per month
• 2,000,000 CloudFront Function invocations per month
• Free SSL certificates
• No limitations, all features available

The best part of the free plan is that there are no limitations on the features available to you. This means that, as long as you stay below the usage thresholds laid out above, you can spend as much time as you want building out your CloudFront account with integrations, prep your other systems for CloudFront to be fully turned on, and generally try out all of the features to get a full sense of what will work best for you.

This is especially useful for setting up your account, as you can prepare and test everything before applying it to your system. You’ll still have to deal with any unforeseen problems or issues that crop up as you use the service, but you won’t be frantically laying the tracks you’re about to need to keep the train rolling.

The biggest limitation of the free plan is that 1TB limit on data transfer, as if you’re using this service in any kind of professional setting then you’re going to need more than that to cover the number of users you cater to. However, CloudFront continues to be reasonable in its pricing after the free tier’s limits are reached (remember that the free tier will apply to your bills no matter what, making the first 1TB of data transfer out free).

Before going into the paid section of AWS CloudFront’s pricing, note that their prices mostly vary based on the availability region that the data is being sent from.

AWS CloudFront pricing: Data transfer out

First, some good news! If the source of the data going into AWS CloudFront is also AWS-based, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or Elastic Load Balancers, then data transfer is totally free.

Prices for data transfer out of Cloudfront are as follows.

‍United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Israel (per GB):

• First 10TB = $0.085
• Next 40TB = $0.080
• Next 100TB = $0.060
• Next 350TB = $0.040
• Next 524TB = $0.030
• Next 4PB = $0.025
• Over 5PB = $0.020
• Any data transferred out to origin = $0.020

Note that the above price grouping contains two price zones with identical pricing; the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and a second zone containing Europe and Israel.

South Africa, Kenya, Middle East, and South America (per GB):

• First 10TB = $0.110
• Next 40TB = $0.105
• Next 100TB = $0.090
• Next 350TB = $0.080
• Next 524TB = $0.060
• Next 4PB = $0.050
• Over 5PB = $0.040
• Any data transferred out to origin from South Africa, Kenya, or the Middle East = $0.060
• Any data transferred out to origin from South America = $0.125

Note that the above price grouping contains two price zones with identical pricing; South Africa, Kenya, and the Middle East, and a second zone containing South America.

‍Japan (per GB): 

• First 10TB = $0.114
• Next 40TB = $0.089
• Next 100TB = $0.086
• Next 350TB = $0.084
• Next 524TB = $0.080
• Next 4PB = $0.070
• Over 5PB = $0.060
• Any data transferred out to origin = $0.060

‍Australia and New Zealand (per GB):

• First 10TB = $0.114
• Next 40TB = $0.098
• Next 100TB = $0.094
• Next 350TB = $0.092
• Next 524TB = $0.090
• Next 4PB = $0.085
• Over 5PB = $0.080
• Any data transferred out to origin = $0.080

Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam (per GB):

• First 10TB = $0.120
• Next 40TB = $0.100
• Next 100TB = $0.095
• Next 350TB = $0.090
• Next 524TB = $0.080
• Next 4PB = $0.070
• Over 5PB = $0.060
• Any data transferred out to origin = $0.060

India (per GB):

• First 10TB = $0.109
• Next 40TB = $0.085
• Next 100TB = $0.082
• Next 350TB = $0.080
• Next 524TB = $0.078
• Next 4PB = $0.075
• Over 5PB = $0.072
• Any data transferred out to origin = $0.160

If you export at least 10TB of data per month, you may be able to get a discount on your usage. This discount acts in a similar manner to Savings Plans for EC2 instance pricing, whereby you commit to a set period of usage in exchange for a reduced rate. However, similar caution should be taken as when looking into Savings Plans, as you may end up paying more than a standard rate if your usage isn’t consistent or high enough.

The more data that you export beyond 10TB per month, the bigger the discount that you will qualify for.

There are also charges for all HTTP methods, which are as follows.

‍HTTP requests (per 10,000):

• United States, Mexico, and Canada = $0.0075
• Europe, Israel, South Africa, Kenya, Middle East, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and India = $0.0090
• South America = $0.0160

HTTPS requests (per 10,000):

• United States, Mexico, and Canada = $0.0100
• Europe, Israel, South Africa, Kenya, Middle East, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and India = $0.0120
• Australia and New Zealand = $0.0125
• South America = $0.0220

The final element of AWS CloudFront pricing for data transfer is choosing your price class. Your price class dictates which of the available regions you want to use CloudFront to supply data to, as any regions not covered by your price class will connect directly to your data source instead. This is a great way of either limiting regions with little to no traffic so that you don’t spend money on them, or of controlling your costs by not allowing certain more expensive regions to utilize CloudFront.

The price classes are as follows:

• Price Class All = All regions
• Price Class 200 = Everywhere except for South America, Australia, and New Zealand
• Price Class 100 = Only United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Israel

AWS CloudFront pricing: Addons

AWS CloudFront has a few addons that are charged separately from the main product. These are CloudFront Functions, which is a serverless scripting platform that lets you run lightweight JavaScript code, and Lambda@Edge, which is a fully programmable, serverless edge computing environment.

For CloudFront Functions, each time an invocation is triggered via a CloudFront event, you will be charged. The price works out to be $0.10 per 1 million invocations, or $0.0000001 per invocation.

Lambda@Edge is slightly more complex in its pricing, and is also based on requests triggered via CloudFront events. In addition to this, you will be charged based on every GB-second used.

‍Lambda@Edge integration prices are:

• $0.60 per 1M requests ($0.0000006 per request)
• $0.00005001 for every GB-second

AWS CloudFront pricing: Additional features

Let’s run through all of the additional features which you can choose to pay out for when using AWS CloudFront. These are as follows.

‍Origin Shield can be set up as a centralized caching layer for use with CloudFront. The prices for this are per 10,000 HTTP requests:

• United States = $0.0075
• Europe, Japan, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and India = $0.0090
• South America = $0.0160

If you wish to invalidate data paths from the CloudFront cache, the first 1,000 per month are free. After that, you’ll have to pay $0.005 per path requested for invalidation.

‍Real-time log requests are charged by the number of lines generated and published to the log’s destination. This costs $0.01 for every 1,000,000 log lines.

‍Field-level encryption on your requests costs $0.02 for every 10,000 requests that are encrypted by CloudFront.

Using a Dedicated IP custom SSL certificate with one or more CloudFront distribution is charged per hour that it is used for. The cost works out to be $600 per month, or $20 per 24 hours.

That’s it! Now all you need to know is how to take all of that knowledge (and everything about the possible AWS CloudFront savings plans that we can’t say due to their individuality) and apply it to your own situation to get the most out of your AWS bill.

If, however, you don’t have the resources to pay for a full-time AWS expert to handle all of that for you, don’t worry! We have another, much easier, way of achieving the same savings…

How to crush and consolidate your AWS bills

We here at Aimably make no secret of how infuriating it is to try and optimize your AWS bills. Heck, it’s enough of a hassle to try and consolidate and contextualize your existing bills, let alone keep track of all of the different savings that you could be making, and know which ones are best for your team.

That’s why we’re here - to take the pain out of AWS bills for you.

With our AWS Cost Reduction Assessment, you’ll receive a prioritized list of things that you can do to immediately reduce your AWS bill, and tips for how to optimize it in the future without reducing your effectiveness. We draw from every available deal, Savings Plan, and our years of experience to cater to your needs.

‍What are you waiting for? Sign up with Aimably today to take full control of your AWS finances.