Bunny.net vs Cloudflare in 2026: Why Developers Are Quietly Making the Switch
A post titled "Dropping Cloudflare for bunny.net" hit the front page of Hacker News this week and triggered exactly the kind of debate you'd expect. Hundreds of developers piled in — not to argue about CDN latency benchmarks — but to share war stories about Cloudflare account terminations, unpredictable enterprise pricing, and the growing unease of routing half the internet through a single US corporation. The Bunny.net vs Cloudflare conversation isn't new, but it's hit a tipping point. After running my own sites through both providers, I think the developer community is right to pay attention.
This isn't a "Cloudflare is bad" post. Cloudflare built something impressive. But the trade-offs of their model are getting harder to ignore, and a bootstrapped Slovenian company charging $0.005/GB egress is offering something Cloudflare structurally can't: simplicity without strings.
Why Are Developers Switching From Cloudflare to Bunny.net?
The trigger for most switches isn't performance. It's trust.
Cloudflare's free tier is extraordinary. Free CDN, free DNS, free SSL, free DDoS protection. For a personal blog or a side project, it's genuinely hard to beat. But that generosity creates a dependency that's starting to make people nervous.
The core concern, repeated across the Hacker News discussion, is simple: if Cloudflare decides to terminate your account, every service behind it goes dark. Your DNS, your CDN, your edge workers, your tunnels. All of it. Simultaneously. One commenter called it "a single point of failure for the internet," and they're not wrong. When Cloudflare has an outage, it makes international news because that much of the web depends on it.
I've seen this exact pattern play out with other "free" platforms. You build your entire stack on the generous tier, and then one day the terms change, or your account gets flagged, or you trip over an undocumented limit. Suddenly the free thing is the most expensive thing you've ever used, because migration is now an emergency instead of a plan.
Jola, the developer who wrote the original blog post, nailed it: paying Bunny.net's $1/month minimum is "a cheap price to pay to stop being the product and start becoming the customer." That framing resonated with the HN crowd. It resonates with me too.
The centralization argument goes deeper than individual risk. Cloudflare now sits in the critical path of a staggering percentage of web traffic. That concentration of power should make anyone building for the open web uncomfortable, regardless of how well Cloudflare has behaved so far. If you've read about how infrastructure choices carry geopolitical risk, you know this kind of single-provider dependency is a real architectural concern, not just philosophical hand-wringing.
Bunny.net vs Cloudflare: Pricing That Actually Makes Sense
Let's talk numbers, because this is where Bunny.net's pitch gets concrete.
Bunny.net's CDN pricing is geo-regional and purely usage-based. Europe and North America bandwidth costs $0.005/GB. Asia and Oceania run $0.03/GB. South America and the Middle East sit at $0.045/GB. Africa is $0.06/GB. There's a $1/month minimum charge regardless of usage.
Cloudflare's CDN is "free" on the base plan. No bandwidth charges. Zero. That sounds unbeatable until you need anything beyond the free tier. Cloudflare's Pro plan is $20/month. Business is $200/month. Enterprise is custom pricing that multiple HN commenters described as eye-wateringly expensive. One noted the jump from Business to Enterprise felt like "going from a bike to a private jet."
Here's the thing nobody's saying about this pricing model: Cloudflare's free tier works because you're the funnel, not the customer. The free plan exists to get companies onto the platform so they eventually need Workers, R2, Zero Trust, or some other paid product. That's a legitimate business model. But it means the incentive structure isn't aligned with keeping small users happy. It's aligned with converting them.
Bunny.net's model is boring in the best way. You pay for what you use. A personal blog serving 50GB/month in North America costs $0.25 plus the $1 minimum. A startup serving 1TB/month costs about $5. The math is predictable, the invoices are tiny, and there's no cliff where you suddenly need to talk to a sales team.
For context: serving 1TB through AWS CloudFront would cost roughly $85. Through Google Cloud CDN, about $80. Bunny.net at $5 isn't just cheaper than Cloudflare's paid tiers. It's cheaper than basically everything except Cloudflare's free tier. And unlike the free tier, you're actually a paying customer with a support relationship.
| Feature | Cloudflare (Free) | Cloudflare (Pro) | Bunny.net |
|---|---|---|---|
| CDN bandwidth | Free (fair use) | Free (fair use) | $0.005/GB (NA/EU) |
| DDoS protection | Basic | Enhanced | Basic (Shield add-on) |
| Custom rules | 5 | 20 | Flexible |
| Support | Community only | Email + priority | |
| Monthly minimum | $0 | $20 | $1 |
| Edge compute | Workers (free tier) | Workers | Edge Scripting |
| DNS | Free | Free | Free |
| Typical 1TB/mo cost | $0 | $20 | ~$5 |
CDN Performance: Is Bunny.net Actually Fast Enough?
The honest answer: for most use cases, yes.
Cloudflare operates over 300 data centers in more than 100 countries. That's a massive network, and for global enterprise traffic, it's hard to match. Bunny.net runs a smaller network, around 123 points of presence across 80+ regions. Fewer locations, but strategically placed.
In practice? The performance difference for most websites is negligible. Sites like CDNPerf track real-world latency across providers, and Bunny.net consistently lands in the top tier globally. Often within single-digit milliseconds of Cloudflare in Europe and North America. For sites primarily serving those regions — which covers most indie developers and startups — Bunny.net's network is more than sufficient.
Where Cloudflare genuinely pulls ahead is edge compute. Cloudflare Workers, powered by V8 isolates, are a mature platform for running serverless code at the edge. I wrote about how Cloudflare Workers deliver 100x faster cold starts previously, and that advantage is real. Bunny.net has Edge Scripting, but it's newer, less documented, and uses a proprietary SDK that drew criticism in the HN thread for creating its own form of vendor lock-in.
If your architecture depends heavily on edge compute, Cloudflare is still the stronger choice. But if you're using a CDN as a CDN — caching, acceleration, DDoS protection — Bunny.net delivers comparable performance at a fraction of the complexity.
[YOUTUBE:-6XeIcXs6gg|Cloudflare vs. Bunny.net: the ultimate CDN?]
The EU Factor: Why Bunny.net Being European Matters
Bunny.net is headquartered in Slovenia, which means it operates under EU data protection law by default. For developers building products that serve European users, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's increasingly a hard compliance requirement.
Cloudflare is a US company subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act, which can compel disclosure of data stored anywhere in the world. For many applications this doesn't matter. For some, it's a dealbreaker.
But the EU angle goes beyond GDPR compliance. There's a growing sentiment — visible in the HN discussion and across broader developer communities — that supporting non-US infrastructure companies matters for the health of the internet. The web works better when there isn't a single chokepoint. Having viable European alternatives to US tech giants isn't just ideological. It's good infrastructure hygiene.
This is the same argument behind why internet infrastructure diversity matters. When one country or one company controls too much of the pipe, everyone is more fragile.
The Developer Experience Gap
Bunny.net's dashboard is simple. Not "simple" in the marketing-copy sense. Actually simple. You create a pull zone, point your origin at it, configure your DNS, and you're done. The setup for Jola's blog migration took minutes, not hours. The documentation is clear, the pricing page doesn't require a PhD in cloud billing to decode, and support actually responds.
Cloudflare's dashboard, by contrast, has become a labyrinth. So many products, settings, and upsell prompts that finding a simple toggle can feel like navigating an enterprise SaaS platform. Which, to be fair, it is. Cloudflare has evolved from a CDN into a full edge computing platform with DNS, storage (R2), serverless compute (Workers), zero-trust networking, email routing, and more. That breadth is great if you need it. It's overwhelming if you just want to cache some static assets.
I've shipped projects on both platforms. For anything where I need a full edge computing stack, Cloudflare is hard to beat. But for the 80% of projects that just need fast, reliable content delivery? Bunny.net gets out of my way in a way that Cloudflare hasn't in years.
The best infrastructure is the kind you forget about. Bunny.net is boring in exactly the right way.
One underrated detail: Bunny.net offers a $20 free trial credit without requiring a credit card. Add a card and you get another $30. That's enough to seriously evaluate the platform on a real project without any financial commitment. Cloudflare's free tier is technically more generous, but Bunny.net's trial is honest about what it is — a trial, not a permanent dependency.
Who Should Actually Switch?
Let me be direct.
Switch to Bunny.net if you're an indie developer, a startup with predictable CDN needs, or anyone who values simple pricing and wants to reduce single-vendor risk. If your primary use case is content delivery, image optimization, or video streaming, Bunny.net is excellent and dramatically cheaper than Cloudflare's paid tiers.
Stay on Cloudflare if you're deep into Workers, R2, or the zero-trust networking stack. Cloudflare's edge compute platform is genuinely best-in-class right now, and migrating that workload is non-trivial. If you're using Cloudflare as a compute platform rather than just a CDN, the switching cost is high and the alternatives aren't there yet.
Consider the hybrid approach. Several HN commenters mentioned running Bunny.net for CDN and DNS while keeping Cloudflare for specific edge compute workloads. This is probably the most pragmatic path for teams that want to reduce their Cloudflare dependency without a full rip-and-replace.
The broader trend here matters more than any single provider comparison. Developers are waking up to the risks of concentrating critical infrastructure behind one company's free tier. Whether you switch to Bunny.net, Fastly, KeyCDN, or something else entirely, the instinct to diversify your infrastructure dependencies is sound engineering. The cheapest option isn't always the one with the $0 price tag. Sometimes it's the one that costs a dollar and actually treats you like a customer.
Originally published on kunalganglani.com
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