CloudFront still charges by the gigabyte leaving its network

The workload

A content delivery network's job is to move bytes from storage to a visitor's browser with low latency, and Amazon CloudFront prices that job by how much data leaves its network toward the internet, the metered egress model this batch's R2 entry is built to contrast against. The workload a founder takes on is capacity planning: estimating monthly data-transfer-out volume by region, since AWS's own CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing page, retrieved 16 September 2026, prices the same gigabyte differently depending on where the visitor is served from.

What the documents show

The pricing page states, as verified vendor fact, that the first 1 TB of data transfer out per month is "Free" across every listed region, and that this 1 TB, with "10,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS Requests per month" and "2,000,000 CloudFront Function invocations per month," sits inside what the page calls an "Always Free Tier," not a time-limited promotion. Above that, the page's tiered table prices the next block by region: for "United States, Mexico, and Canada," the "Next 350TB" of monthly transfer costs $0.040 per GB, a verified figure from the same table. A second AWS document, the S3 pricing page, adds a comparable figure for a different service: a worked example stating "Data Transfer out from Amazon S3 in Europe (Ireland) to internet is $0.09 per GB," roughly double CloudFront's post-free-tier US rate for the same unit, a structural point about paying for a CDN layer rather than a restatement of the R2 entry's figures.

The operating cost

For a workload transferring 2 TB out to US-region visitors in a month, CloudFront's rates apply the first 1 TB free and price the remaining 1,000 GB at $0.040 per GB, for $40 that month, an estimate built from the stated per-unit price applied to an illustrative volume. Pricing varies further by content type, request protocol, and edge functions, each carrying its own stated rate on the same page; this entry states only the core data-transfer-out figure the R2 contrast turns on.

The stop condition

The documents name the 1 TB and 350 TB boundaries as the points the per-GB rate changes; no cancellation trigger beyond usage thresholds is stated. Editorially, the stop condition for choosing a metered-egress CDN over a zero-egress one is the volume at which the free tier is routinely exceeded and the resulting bill costs more than an alternative's flat pricing, a threshold specific to each app's traffic, not stated by AWS.

• What fraction of this month's traffic falls inside CloudFront's 1 TB always-free allowance?
• Does the visitor base concentrate in a region priced at $0.040 per GB, or a higher-priced region on the same table?
• Would serving the same content from S3 directly, without CloudFront, cost less or more at this volume?

CloudFront's own tiered, region-priced data-transfer-out rates are the metered-egress baseline this batch's zero-egress and partner-egress entries for R2 and Backblaze B2 are contrasted against; the figures above are AWS's own numbers as published on 16 September 2026.