On November 18th, AWS introduced new flat‑rate pricing plans for Amazon CloudFront designed to make content delivery and security costs more predictable for teams of all sizes. These plans sit alongside the existing pay‑as‑you‑go model and bundle multiple services into a single monthly price per distribution.
Why Flat-Rate Pricing Matters
Traditionally, CloudFront has used pay‑as‑you‑go pricing, which is great for starting at $0, scaling with actual usage, and only paying for what you consume. The tradeoff is that estimating costs can be difficult, especially when you also depend on AWS WAF, DDoS protection, Route 53, CloudWatch Logs, and S3 for a single application. You end up stitching together multiple pricing pages and trying to map them to your traffic patterns just to get a reasonable forecast of your monthly bill.
The new flat‑rate plans aim to simplify this. Instead of tracking every request, rule, and log line, you choose a plan tier per distribution and pay a fixed monthly fee that includes a defined bundle of features and usage allowances.
What's Included in the New Plans
Each flat‑rate plan bundles the following into one monthly price per CloudFront distribution:
- Amazon CloudFront CDN
- AWS WAF and DDoS protection
- Bot management and analytics
- Amazon Route 53 DNS
- Amazon CloudWatch Logs ingestion
- Serverless edge compute (via CloudFront Functions)
- Monthly Amazon S3 storage credits
Because everything is packaged together, you get a predictable bill for that distribution with no overage charges. There are no surprises at the end of the month.
A few structural details to keep in mind:
- Plans are per distribution. If you put two distributions on the Business plan at $200 each, you will pay $400 per month for those two.
- You can upgrade at any time, but downgrades/cancellations or a move back to pay‑as‑you‑go only take effect at the start of the next billing cycle.
- There is a limit of three free plans per AWS account and a limit of 100 total plans per account, which matters if you run many environments or tenants.
Handling Attacks and Traffic Spikes
One of the more reassuring aspects of these plans is how they treat malicious traffic. DDoS attacks do not count against your usage allowance, and traffic blocked by AWS WAF or bot protections also does not consume your plan quota. That means an attack should not cause you to exceed your allowance.
You will receive email notifications when you hit 50%, 80%, and 100% of your usage allowance for the month. If you exceed the allowance, AWS will not tack on overage fees, but you may experience reduced performance. That performance reduction is at AWS's discretion and depends on overall network conditions and other factors, so consistently bumping into your limits is a good signal that it is time to move to a higher‑tier plan.
Edge Compute: CloudFront Functions vs. Lambda@Edge
All of the flat‑rate plans include CloudFront Functions, which are ideal for lightweight JavaScript logic at the edge such as header manipulation, redirects, and simple request or response normalization. For many use cases, this will cover the bulk of what you might previously have used Lambda@Edge for.
However, Lambda@Edge is not supported on the flat‑rate plans. If your distribution relies on Lambda@Edge, such as more complex request processing, integrations, or heavy transformations, you must keep that distribution on the pay‑as‑you‑go pricing model. This is an important constraint to verify before flipping an existing production distribution over to a flat‑rate plan.
Pay-As-You-Go Is Still Available
All of this arrives in addition to, not instead of, the existing pay‑as‑you‑go model. The traditional CloudFront pricing structure remains available with its free tier, which is still a solid option for:
- Very low‑traffic or experimental workloads
- Architectures that depend on Lambda@Edge or other features not supported in flat‑rate plans
- Teams that prefer pure usage‑based billing and are comfortable modeling and monitoring their costs
In practice, many organizations will likely end up with a mix: flat‑rate plans for high‑volume, business‑critical sites where predictability matters, and pay‑as‑you‑go for specialized or experimental distributions.
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