![\"Akamai](\"https:\/\/www.vdocipher.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/download-300x122.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAkamai remains the CDN revenue leader, reporting $4.208 billion for full-year 2025, up 5% year over year<\/strong>. It is also no longer purely a CDN. Akamai acquired Linode for approximately $900 million in March 2022 and launched Akamai Connected Cloud<\/strong> in February 2023 \u2014 a distributed compute and storage platform spanning roughly 4,100 points of presence across 135 countries, pitched explicitly on CDN-style egress economics rather than hyperscaler pricing.<\/p>\nFor media, Adaptive Media Delivery<\/strong> remains the core product, covering adaptive bitrate streaming, origin shielding, token authentication and media analytics. Akamai also absorbed several hundred Edgio customers in late 2024 via the asset purchase, giving them a migration path before Edgio’s network shut down.<\/p>\nKey Advantages of Akamai<\/h4>\n\n- Largest CDN by revenue, with the deepest last-mile footprint in underserved regions<\/li>\n
- Around 4,100 PoPs across 135 countries via Connected Cloud<\/li>\n
- Mature media delivery feature set: adaptive delivery, origin shield, token auth, media analytics<\/li>\n
- Compute and object storage now available alongside delivery, with cheaper egress than hyperscalers<\/li>\n
- Strongest enterprise security posture and SLA terms on this list<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Where it costs you:<\/strong> Akamai still sells through sales contact rather than self-service signup, pricing is contract-negotiated rather than published, and the entry commitment puts it out of reach for small teams.<\/p>\n7. Cloudflare<\/h3>\n
Cloudflare reported $2,167.9 million in revenue for 2025, up 30%<\/strong>, and serves as reverse proxy for 24.2% of all websites. For video, its significance is a pricing model rather than a feature: R2 object storage charges zero egress fees<\/strong>, at roughly $0.015 per GB per month for storage.<\/p>\nCloudflare Stream<\/strong> is the managed video product, and it prices per minute rather than per gigabyte: $5 per 1,000 minutes stored per month<\/strong> and $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered<\/strong>, which works out to about $0.06 per watch-hour. Ingest, encoding and delivery are all included, with no egress line item at all. One caveat that surprises people on their first invoice: each adaptive bitrate rendition Stream generates counts against your stored minutes, so a video encoded into five renditions consumes five times its duration in storage.<\/p>\nKey Advantages of Cloudflare<\/h4>\n\n- Zero egress fees on R2, which removes the single largest variable in video hosting cost<\/li>\n
- Stream prices per minute delivered, making cost per viewer directly predictable<\/li>\n
- Encoding, player and delivery included in Stream with no separate transcoding bill<\/li>\n
- Unified platform \u2014 CDN, R2, Stream, Workers and WAF under one account and one bill<\/li>\n
- Network handles 60+ million HTTP requests per second at peak<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Where it costs you:<\/strong> rendition-multiplied storage minutes make Stream’s effective storage cost higher than it first appears, and the per-minute model becomes less competitive than raw CDN pricing for very high-volume, long-form libraries.<\/p>\n8. Fastly<\/h3>\n
Fastly reported $624.0 million in revenue for 2025, up 15%<\/strong>. Its differentiator is the programmable edge \u2014 VCL and Compute let you run logic at the PoP, which matters for signed URLs, geo-restriction, token validation and manifest manipulation.<\/p>\nFor media specifically, Media Shield<\/strong> provides a multi-CDN origin shielding layer, and the On-the-Fly Packager<\/strong> repackages a single mezzanine into HLS or DASH at the edge rather than pre-generating every format. Fastly Object Storage charges zero egress. Media customers include A+E Networks, Vimeo, Dish Network and Brightcove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n| Fastly region<\/th>\n | Pay-as-you-go bandwidth<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n |
\n\n| North America and Europe<\/td>\n | ~$0.12 per GB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| Asia Pacific<\/td>\n | ~$0.19 per GB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| South America<\/td>\n | ~$0.28 per GB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n |
\n| HTTPS requests<\/td>\n | ~$0.0090 per 10,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Committed-volume contracts typically land 20\u201340% below these rates.<\/p>\n Key Advantages of Fastly<\/h4>\n\n- Programmable edge compute for token auth, geo-blocking and manifest manipulation at the PoP<\/li>\n
- Instant cache purge, measured in milliseconds rather than minutes<\/li>\n
- Media Shield reduces origin load in multi-CDN architectures<\/li>\n
- On-the-Fly Packager removes the need to pre-generate every delivery format<\/li>\n
- Zero egress on Fastly Object Storage<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Where it costs you:<\/strong> the most expensive pay-as-you-go bandwidth on this list, with steep regional multipliers. Fastly is a performance and control purchase, not a cost-optimisation one.<\/p>\n9. Backblaze B2<\/h3>\nBackblaze B2 is the cheapest raw storage here at $6 per TB per month ($0.006 per GB)<\/strong>, S3-compatible, with no minimum retention period, a 10 GB free tier and 500,000+ customers.<\/p>\nThe egress model is what makes it relevant to video. Backblaze includes free egress up to three times your monthly stored data<\/strong>, then charges $0.01 per GB. More importantly, egress to Cloudflare, Fastly and other Bandwidth Alliance partners is free and unmetered<\/strong>. Pairing B2 as origin with Cloudflare as CDN produces a stack with effectively zero delivery cost from origin to edge.<\/p>\nKey Advantages of Backblaze B2<\/h4>\n\n- Cheapest per-GB storage on this list at $0.006<\/li>\n
- Free unlimited egress to Cloudflare and Fastly via the Bandwidth Alliance<\/li>\n
- Free egress up to 3x stored data even to non-partner destinations<\/li>\n
- S3-compatible API, so existing tooling works without modification<\/li>\n
- No minimum retention period, unlike most archive-oriented storage<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Where it costs you:<\/strong> storage only \u2014 no transcoding, no player, no DRM. B2 is one component of a stack, not a video platform.<\/p>\n10. Wasabi<\/h3>\nWasabi sells flat-rate hot storage with no egress or API request fees<\/strong>, subject to a fair-use policy that caps monthly egress at roughly 1x your stored volume. Pricing is $6.99 per TB per month, rising to $7.99 per TB on 1 July 2026<\/strong>, with a 1 TB minimum and a 90-day minimum storage duration.<\/p>\nThe 1:1 egress ratio is the deciding constraint. A 5 TB library serving 5 TB per month fits comfortably. The same library serving 50 TB per month does not, and Wasabi is the wrong tool for it.<\/p>\n Key Advantages of Wasabi<\/h4>\n\n- Completely predictable cost \u2014 one flat rate, no egress or request line items<\/li>\n
- No API request charges, which matters for HLS workloads generating high request volumes<\/li>\n
- S3-compatible and straightforward to integrate as a CDN origin<\/li>\n
- Well suited to stable archives and libraries with modest delivery-to-storage ratios<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Where it costs you:<\/strong> the 1:1 fair-use ratio rules out high-traffic streaming, the 90-day minimum retention penalises high-churn libraries, and there is a 1 TB floor.<\/p>\n11. DigitalOcean Spaces<\/h3>\nDigitalOcean Spaces bundles object storage, outbound transfer and a built-in CDN into a single flat $5 per month<\/strong> subscription, with per-GB overage above the included allowance. The CDN is included at no extra charge.<\/p>\nThis is the simplest option here, and for small platforms \u2014 a course library, a membership site, an internal training portal \u2014 the flat rate removes billing surprises entirely.<\/p>\n Key Advantages of DigitalOcean Spaces<\/h4>\n\n- Flat $5 per month entry point covering storage, transfer and CDN<\/li>\n
- CDN included rather than billed separately<\/li>\n
- S3-compatible API with a notably clean developer experience<\/li>\n
- Predictable billing, which is the main reason small teams choose it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Where it costs you:<\/strong> no transcoding, no player, no DRM, and a much smaller edge footprint than any dedicated CDN. Overage rates make it unattractive once you outgrow the bundle.<\/p>\nStorage and Egress Pricing Compared<\/h2>\nRaw storage prices have converged into a narrow band \u2014 roughly $0.006 to $0.026 per GB across every provider here. Egress has not converged at all, and spans zero to $0.28 per GB. For video, egress is the decision.<\/strong> Delivery bytes exceed stored bytes by one to two orders of magnitude in any active library, so the storage column below is largely noise and the egress column is the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n| Provider (product)<\/th>\n | Storage per GB\/month<\/th>\n | Egress model<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| AWS S3 Standard<\/td>\n | $0.023<\/td>\n | $0.09 per GB (100 GB free; free to CloudFront)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Azure Blob Hot<\/td>\n | ~$0.018<\/td>\n | $0.087 per GB (100 GB free)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Google Cloud Storage Standard<\/td>\n | $0.020<\/td>\n | $0.12 per GB first 1 TB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Oracle OCI Object Storage<\/td>\n | ~$0.0255<\/td>\n | 10 TB\/month free, then $0.0085 per GB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Cloudflare R2<\/td>\n | ~$0.015<\/td>\n | Zero egress<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Bunny Storage<\/td>\n | $0.01<\/td>\n | Free to Bunny CDN; CDN from $0.005 per GB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Backblaze B2<\/td>\n | $0.006<\/td>\n | Free up to 3x stored; free to Cloudflare and Fastly<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Wasabi<\/td>\n | ~$0.0068 (rising to ~$0.0078 on 1 July 2026)<\/td>\n | Free within 1:1 ratio<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| DigitalOcean Spaces<\/td>\n | ~$0.02 (in $5 bundle)<\/td>\n | Bundle allowance, then ~$0.01 per GB<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Alibaba OSS \/ ApsaraVideo<\/td>\n | Usage-based (first 50 GB free)<\/td>\n | Pay-as-you-go CDN<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n CDN delivery, which is what you actually pay for once a library is live:<\/p>\n \n\n\n| CDN<\/th>\n | First-tier delivery (NA\/EU)<\/th>\n | Notes<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| Amazon CloudFront<\/td>\n | $0.085 per GB<\/td>\n | 1 TB\/month permanently free<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Azure Front Door<\/td>\n | ~$0.083 per GB<\/td>\n | Plus $35\u2013$330\/month base fee<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Google Cloud CDN<\/td>\n | $0.08 per GiB<\/td>\n | Falls to $0.02 per GiB at 1 PB+<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Fastly<\/td>\n | $0.12 per GB<\/td>\n | $0.19 APAC, $0.28 South America<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Bunny CDN<\/td>\n | $0.01 per GB standard; $0.005 volume<\/td>\n | Lowest published mainstream rate<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Cloudflare Stream<\/td>\n | $0.001 per minute delivered<\/td>\n | ~$0.06 per watch-hour; no per-GB egress<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Cloudflare R2 \/ Backblaze via Cloudflare<\/td>\n | $0<\/td>\n | Zero-egress origin-to-edge path<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n A worked example makes the spread concrete. A library delivering 50 TB per month<\/strong> in North America and Europe, after free allowances:<\/p>\n\n\n\n| Provider<\/th>\n | Approximate monthly delivery cost at 50 TB<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n | \n\n| Fastly<\/td>\n | ~$6,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Amazon CloudFront<\/td>\n | ~$4,165 (first TB free)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Google Cloud CDN<\/td>\n | ~$4,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Azure Front Door<\/td>\n | ~$4,185 (including Standard base fee)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Oracle OCI<\/td>\n | ~$340 (10 TB free, 40 TB at $0.0085)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Bunny CDN, standard network<\/td>\n | ~$500<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n | \n| Bunny CDN, volume network<\/td>\n | ~$250<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Calculated at list rates for illustration; committed-volume contracts reduce hyperscaler and Fastly figures materially. The point is the order of magnitude, not the exact number.<\/em><\/p>\nEncoding and Delivery Standards in 2026<\/h2>\nThree things have shifted in how video is encoded and delivered, and each has a direct cost or compatibility consequence.<\/p>\n Codec adoption.<\/strong> NETINT’s 2026 State of Video Encoding survey found HEVC\/H.265 in production at 65% of responding organisations, with a further 20% planning deployment. AV1 is in production at 17%, with 40% planning deployment. AV1 is royalty-free; HEVC carries three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, Velos Media), which is a licensing cost and an administrative burden rather than a technical one. On efficiency, an independent analysis of a live Netflix AV1 stream measured average bitrate 48.1% below the equivalent H.264 stream \u2014 a single-title measurement rather than a platform-wide statistic, but directionally consistent with published AV1 benchmarks. Lower bitrate translates directly into lower egress cost at every provider in the tables above.<\/p>\nLow-latency HLS.<\/strong> Standard HLS runs 18\u201325 seconds behind live. LL-HLS, added to the specification in 2020, targets sub-2-second latency by delivering partial segments. It generates many more small requests, which is why HTTP\/3 and QUIC adoption at CDN edges \u2014 now past 40% of live-stream traffic by 2026 industry measurements \u2014 materially improves its behaviour. If you are quoting per-request CDN pricing for a live workload, model LL-HLS request volumes, not standard HLS.<\/p>\nSwitching egress under the EU Data Act.<\/strong> Regulation (EU) 2023\/2854 caps switching charges \u2014 which expressly include egress incurred in moving providers \u2014 from 11 January 2024, and eliminates them entirely from 12 January 2027<\/strong>. Google dropped exit-egress fees in January 2024 and AWS followed in March 2024, citing the Act. Google launched Data Transfer Essentials on 11 September 2025, a day before the switching provisions applied. The important qualifier: this covers switching<\/em> egress only. Normal operational egress \u2014 serving video to your viewers \u2014 remains fully billable and is unaffected.<\/p>\nSelf-Assembled Stack vs Managed Video Platform<\/h2>\nEverything above covers storage, transcoding and delivery. The fourth component \u2014 protection \u2014 is where self-assembly stops being a pricing exercise and becomes an engineering project.<\/p>\n Published build-vs-buy analysis puts a production-grade multi-DRM implementation covering Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady at $10,000 to $50,000 in initial engineering cost<\/strong> depending on team experience, plus $500 to $1,500 per month in ongoing operational cost<\/strong>, with a first-time implementation typically taking three to six months<\/strong>.<\/p>\n | | | |
![\"AWS](\"https:\/\/www.vdocipher.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/klarna-signs-deal-with-aws-1575354413.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/www.vdocipher.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/download-1.png\")
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