Cloudflare vs. AWS CloudFront: Which CDN Gives You More for Free?

Every time you deploy a new web project, the first instinct is to slap a free CDN in front of it. In 2026, the landscape of "free" content delivery has shifted. While Cloudflare has maintained its legendary unmetered bandwidth model, AWS recently overhauled its CDN pricing by introducing new "Flat-Rate" plans to sit alongside its traditional Pay-As-You-Go Always-Free tier. The question isn't just who gives you more on paper—it's who won't hit you with a surprise bill when a random crawler hammers your site.

The Raw Limits

To see where the bottlenecks are, let’s look at the hard caps. AWS currently has two competing free models, which makes their offering unnecessarily complicated.

Where AWS CloudFront Falls Short

AWS forces you to navigate a billing trap. If you stick to their legacy Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) model, you get a generous 1 TB of outbound data and 10 million requests for free. However, if you opt into their new 2026 Flat-Rate Free plan, your allowance plummets to just 100 GB of transfer and 1 million requests.

The critical flaw in AWS's system is security overhead. Under the PAYG model, AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) rules cost extra. If your application gets hit by a volumetric attack or aggressive scraping, you burn through that 10 million request buffer fast. Once you cross the threshold, AWS starts billing you. You have to set up strict AWS billing alarms just to sleep soundly.

Configure your AWS CloudFront limits and billing alarms safely here

Why Cloudflare Remains the Developer Default

Cloudflare’s approach is brutally simple: they do not charge for data transfer out. Whether you push 10 GB or 10 TB of cached assets, your monthly baseline cost remains $0.

They do enforce a 512 MB per-file cache limit across their Free, Pro, and Business tiers. This means you can't use their free tier to offload massive 4K video hosting. But for React SPAs, static blogs, standard APIs, and image assets, it operates flawlessly. More importantly, Cloudflare includes unmetered DDoS protection and basic WAF rules out of the box on the free tier. When traffic spikes, Cloudflare absorbs it rather than invoicing you.

Explore Cloudflare's unmetered Free Plan limits here

Edge Compute: Workers vs. Functions

If you're building serverless logic at the edge—like rewriting headers, verifying auth tokens, or handling A/B testing—both platforms offer free compute.

AWS CloudFront Functions provides 2 million free invocations per month. Cloudflare counters with 100,000 Workers requests per day. While the raw request limits are comparable, Cloudflare's developer ecosystem is vastly superior. The local Wrangler CLI experience, native KV storage support, and lightning-fast deployment times make AWS's CloudFront Functions feel archaic and cumbersome to update. Furthermore, if a Cloudflare Worker exceeds its 10ms CPU time limit, it throws an Error 1102 rather than silently racking up compute duration charges.

The Definitive Winner

Cloudflare is the absolute winner.

For any solo developer, startup, or hobby project, Cloudflare provides a genuinely stress-free environment. AWS CloudFront's fragmented free tiers—forcing you to choose between 1 TB on PAYG or 100 GB on the new Flat-Rate plan—require constant vigilance and manual billing alarms. Cloudflare’s unmetered bandwidth, default DDoS protection, and superior edge compute experience mean you can launch your project and forget about it, knowing a sudden traffic spike won't bankrupt you.

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