ToolsSeptember 8, 2026via Vercel Blog
Introducing Flat Rate CDN
Why it matters
Vercel's new Flat Rate CDN pricing model removes unpredictability from infrastructure costs, letting practitioners adopt caching strategies without fear of viral-traffic bill shock. This is a product pricing shift that changes deployment economics for web teams.
Key signals
- Flat Rate CDN pricing: fixed monthly fee covers CDN requests, fast data transfer, blob data transfer, and observability events
- Default tier included with Pro; higher tiers available for increased capacity
- Traffic spikes absorbed without performance degradation or request rejection—no hard caps
- Case study: team with normal usage spike experienced viral launch that would have cost tens of thousands on usage-based pricing; stayed at $20/month on Flat Rate CDN
- Limited beta (May 2026) showed customers were more willing to adopt caching strategies and reduced billing monitoring overhead
- All new Pro teams have Flat Rate CDN enabled by default; existing Pro teams can opt in
- Premium network routing (private fiber) included by default; performance can improve up to 60% vs. public internet
- Flat Rate CDN default included with Vercel Pro; existing Pro teams can opt in
- Base tier: $20/month covers CDN requests, Fast Data Transfer, Blob Data Transfer, and observability events
- Spike protection: temporary traffic spikes absorbed by Vercel; bill does not increase during spike
- Team example: viral launch that would have generated 'tens of thousands of dollars' in usage-based charges stayed at $20/month flat rate
- Premium routing (private fiber) included by default; no performance degradation during spikes
- Usage tracked at team level across all projects; no per-project capacity management required
- Limited beta since May 2026 showed customers spent less time monitoring bot activity and were more willing to adopt caching strategies
- Tier is fixed throughout billing period; auto-rightsized monthly based on sustained usage, not peak usage
The hook
Vercel kills surprise CDN bills with flat-rate pricing—a move that could reshape how teams think about caching and traffic spikes.
Over the past year, we have improved Vercel’s Pro pricing to better reflect how teams build, with , , access to , and more. But one area our customers continued to give us feedback on was CDN pricing.expanded user rolesflexible creditsenterprise features
CDN costs should be predictable, but viral la…