AWS · Free tool
Request fees plus data transfer out, by zone. Side-by-side against raw S3 egress so you can see whether the CDN actually pays for itself. And which price class is the right default for your traffic shape.
Estimated monthly CloudFront cost
$0
$0 per year
| Data transfer out | $0 | 5 TB × blended zone rate |
| Request fees | $0 | 50M req × $0.0100 / 10K |
| Raw S3 egress monthly | $0 |
| CloudFront monthly | $0 |
| CDN savings | $0 |
| Verdict | CDN saves money |
Where CloudFront bills sneak up on teams: PriceClass_All on a workload that only serves NA + EU customers, cache miss ratio over 30 percent, Lambda@Edge and CloudFront Functions running on every request, Origin Shield in a region that does not match your origin, and CloudFront in front of a private internal API.
For almost any workload above 50 GB/month with viewers in North America or Europe, CloudFront beats raw S3 or ALB egress on cost alone. The latency win is on top, and the security posture (WAF, Shield, AWS Managed Rules) is too.
The patterns where it loses are narrow. Very low traffic. Very Asia-heavy traffic. Internal-only workloads where the CDN adds nothing.
Does CloudFront actually save money over raw S3 egress?
Almost always yes for any meaningful traffic. S3 charges $0.09/GB egress to internet in the first 10 TB tier. CloudFront charges $0.085/GB to North America and Europe in the same tier, plus tiny request fees, plus the latency win that pays back in conversion. The break-even is somewhere around 10 GB/month of egress; below that the CloudFront request fees and minimum invalidation cost exceed the savings.
What is a price class and why does it matter?
CloudFront has three price classes. PriceClass_All uses every edge globally, including expensive South America, Africa, and Middle East PoPs. PriceClass_200 drops the most expensive zones. PriceClass_100 keeps only North America and Europe. For most B2B SaaS with EU and US customers, PriceClass_100 is the right default and saves 20-30 percent on data transfer with no observable latency impact for the actual users.
How do request fees work?
CloudFront charges per 10,000 HTTPS requests. The rate is around $0.0100 per 10,000 in North America and Europe, slightly higher elsewhere. POST and PUT cost a touch more than GET. For a static site at a million page views a month with 50 assets per page, that is 50M requests, around $50 in request fees. Almost always dwarfed by data transfer.
When does CloudFront cost more than direct?
Three patterns. One, very low traffic (under 5 GB/month) where request fees dominate. Two, traffic concentrated in Asia or Africa where CloudFront request and data rates are higher than direct egress from a regional bucket would be. Three, internal-only workloads behind a private domain where CloudFront adds zero value and full per-GB cost.
