Bandwidth Overage Calculator

Enter the amount of data your site transfers in a month, in terabytes, and the table compares what that traffic costs on Vercel Pro, Netlify Pro, Cloudflare Pages, and Amazon CloudFront. Each row shows the plan cost, the included allowance, the overage charge past it, and the monthly total, with the cheapest platform highlighted. All figures are USD, taken from each provider's published pricing rather than typed in by hand, and the math runs entirely in your browser.

Where the term bandwidth comes from

"Bandwidth" started as a term in signal processing. In radio and telegraphy it meant the width of a frequency band — the difference, in hertz, between the highest and lowest frequency a channel could carry. Harry Nyquist, an engineer at AT&T, showed in papers of 1924 and 1928 how a channel's bandwidth limited the number of signal pulses per second it could pass. Ralph Hartley extended that work, and in the 1940s Claude Shannon tied bandwidth to the maximum information rate a noisy channel could sustain, the result now known as the Shannon–Hartley theorem. A wider band carried more data, so in ordinary use the word drifted from a range of frequencies toward throughput, and finally to the loose sense meant here: the total volume of data a site moves in a month.

That volume is counted in bytes, and hosting providers count them in decimal units, as storage and networking vendors generally do. A gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte is 1,000 GB. Operating systems have long used 1,024-based units under the same names, which is why an advertised drive size never quite matches the figure your computer reports. The International Electrotechnical Commission tried to settle the ambiguity in December 1998, approving an amendment to IEC 60027-2 that added separate binary prefixes — kibi, mebi, gibi, written KiB, MiB, GiB for the 1,024-based powers — but the older habit stuck. Bandwidth bills follow the decimal convention, which is why this calculator treats 1 TB as exactly 1,000 GB.

Charging for that transfer came later than the network itself. Early internet transit was sold by rate rather than total bytes: a provider sampled a link every five minutes across the month, discarded the top five percent of readings, and billed the 95th-percentile figure in megabits per second. That burstable method, still common in colocation and transit, let a customer absorb short spikes without paying for them. Content delivery networks reshaped the model. Akamai, incorporated in August 1998 by a founding team out of MIT that included the mathematician Tom Leighton and his graduate student Daniel Lewin, sold cached delivery mainly through negotiated contracts. Amazon then brought pay-as-you-go, per-gigabyte delivery within reach of small developers, with S3 in 2006 and CloudFront in November 2008. The per-GB overage rates these platforms publish descend directly from that shift, and CloudFront's permanent 1 TB free tier, in place since December 2021, is a later refinement of it.

How the overage is worked out

Every platform here except Cloudflare bills the same way: a flat plan fee that includes some amount of transfer, then a per-gigabyte rate on whatever exceeds it.

total = plan + max(0, used_GB − included_GB) × rate

The calculator converts terabytes at 1 TB = 1,000 GB, which is how providers bill — decimal units, not the 1,024-based binary units your operating system may report. If usage stays inside the allowance the max() term is zero and you pay the plan fee alone. Cloudflare Pages skips the formula entirely because it does not meter static asset bandwidth at all.

Current rates

The table below reads from the same data file the calculator uses, so both update together. Vercel's figure is its Fast Data Transfer rate for US regions per its published Pro pricing, verified July 2026. Netlify's is the effective rate of its extra credit packs. CloudFront's is the first-tier rate for North America and Europe, after its always-free terabyte.

Three traffic scales, worked through

A side project doing 150 GB a month never touches an overage meter. Vercel and CloudFront both include 1 TB, Netlify's credit allowance covers roughly 150 GB, and Cloudflare is unmetered, so the totals in table order are Vercel $20, Netlify $20, Cloudflare $0, and CloudFront $0. At this scale bandwidth pricing should not drive the platform choice — build workflow and framework support matter far more.

A startup at 2.5 TB, the calculator's default, is where the platforms separate. Vercel bills 2,500 − 1,000 = 1,500 GB of overage at $0.15, which is $225, for a $245 total. Netlify bills 2,500 − 150 = 2,350 GB at about $0.1334, which is $313.49, for a $333.49 total. CloudFront bills 1,500 GB past its free terabyte at $0.085, which is $127.50 with no plan fee. Cloudflare Pages stays at $0. The spread between the cheapest metered option and the most expensive is already wider than the plan fees themselves.

A scale-up pushing 20 TB makes the per-gigabyte rate the whole story. Vercel: 19,000 GB × $0.15 = $2,850, plus $20 is $2,870. Netlify: 19,850 GB × $0.1334 = $2,647.99, plus $20 is $2,667.99. CloudFront: 19,000 GB × $0.085 = $1,615. Cloudflare: still $0 for the static transfer. At this volume every provider with a sales team would rather negotiate a committed-use deal than bill you list rates, and you should let them.

What each platform actually meters

Vercel meters Fast Data Transfer — bytes moved between its edge network and your visitors. The Pro plan includes 1 TB, and the $0.15 rate applies when traffic is served from US regions; other regions run up to $0.35 per GB, so a site with mostly Asia-Pacific traffic pays a real multiplier on the same byte count.

Netlify moved to a credit system. The Pro plan bundles 3,000 credits a month, bandwidth draws 20 credits per gigabyte, and 3,000 divided by 20 is the 150 GB allowance shown in the table. Once those credits are gone, an extra pack costs $10 for 1,500 credits, which buys 75 GB — the $0.1334 effective rate this calculator uses. The included figure assumes you spend the bundled credits on nothing else; compute and production deploys draw from the same pool, so heavy CI usage shrinks your effective bandwidth allowance.

Cloudflare does not meter static asset bandwidth for Pages on any plan. That policy has held for years and applies to the free tier. The meters that do exist sit on compute and media: Workers and Pages Functions requests, image transformations, and R2 operations.

CloudFront gives every AWS account 1 TB of transfer out per month, always free, then charges by destination region — $0.085 per GB for North America and Europe at the first tier, more elsewhere. Rates step down at higher volume tiers, which this calculator does not model, so large CloudFront estimates here run slightly high. Transfer from an S3 origin into CloudFront is free, though S3 storage and requests bill normally.

What this comparison leaves out

The totals cover bandwidth and the base plan, nothing else. Function invocations and duration, edge requests, image optimization and build minutes are all separate meters on Vercel and Netlify. Seats now work differently on the two: Vercel Pro is billed per user at $20 a month, so the $20 figure here assumes a single member, while Netlify dropped seat-based pricing in April 2026 and its $20 Pro plan covers unlimited team members. Regional pricing cuts both ways: the Vercel and CloudFront rates shown are their cheapest bands, and globally distributed traffic lands somewhere above them. CloudFront's tiered discounts pull the other direction at high volume. And unmetered does not mean unconditional. Cloudflare retired the old HTML-versus-non-HTML clause from its subscription agreement in May 2023, but its service-specific terms still require non-Enterprise customers to serve video and other large files through a Cloudflare product such as Stream, Images or the developer platform, and they reserve the right to limit CDN access for a site pushing a disproportionate share of large-file traffic. That is the one workload that would make $0 bandwidth too good to be true.

Prices change without notice and figures here are estimates, not quotes; this site is not affiliated with any provider named above. See the site disclaimer.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Vercel charge for bandwidth over 1 TB?

On the Pro plan, Fast Data Transfer past the included 1 TB costs $0.15 per GB when your traffic is served from US regions, so 500 GB of overage adds $75 to the $20 base. Traffic served from other regions costs more, up to $0.35 per GB, which is why two sites with identical transfer volumes can see very different bills.

Is Cloudflare Pages bandwidth really unlimited?

For static assets, yes — Cloudflare does not meter bandwidth for Pages sites on any plan, including the free one. A site serving 20 TB of HTML, CSS, JS and images pays nothing for that transfer. What is metered separately is compute: Pages Functions and Workers requests, image transformations, and R2 storage all have their own meters and free allowances.

What does 2.5 TB a month cost on Netlify Pro?

About $333. The $20 plan includes roughly 150 GB of bandwidth through its credit allowance, leaving 2,350 GB to cover with extra credit packs. At the effective pack rate of about $0.1334 per GB that overage comes to $313.49, for a monthly total of $333.49.

Is CloudFront really free for the first terabyte every month?

Yes. Since December 2021 the CloudFront free tier includes 1 TB of data transfer out per month, permanently — it is not a 12-month trial. Past that, transfer to North America and Europe costs $0.085 per GB at the first volume tier, so 2.5 TB of monthly traffic bills 1,500 GB at that rate, or $127.50.

Why is my actual Vercel bill higher than this estimate?

Bandwidth is only one meter. Vercel also bills edge requests, function duration and invocations, image optimization, and extra team seats, and its per-GB rate rises to as much as $0.35 outside US regions. A media-heavy site with global traffic can owe more for regional transfer and image transformations than for base bandwidth.