This website on AWS costs me 0$ forever, even if it gets famous

When I saw a Community Builders NDA session about CloudFront and new pricing, I was definitely curious.

Today (November 18, 2025), AWS announced new plans for CloudFront, featuring fixed prices for different tiers, and there’s even a free tier available! This means that you can now know exactly how much you are going to spend to distribute your services using a CDN, even if you experience traffic spikes due to external factors, such as a marketing campaign, a link that goes viral on social media, or on other platforms.

When you select a tier (even the free one), you get an “all-included” price that will stabilize your billing in case of unexpected events. If you exceed your plan quota, an email will be sent to you, and requests will be slowed down. However, the service will remain available, and you will not pay a dime more than what your current selected plan indicates. (Currently, the slowing-down mechanism is still to be documented, but I’ll keep this article updated as new details emerge.)

The pay-as-you-go option hasn’t vanished; it’s still available with the same free tier as in the past (first 10TB of traffic and 10 million requests are free). As you can see from the plans, the free tier in the pay-as-you-go option is larger than the $0 one. However, with the latter, you can be assured that a surge of traffic will not drain your credit card, as we sometimes read on Reddit.

Also, note that being on a specific plan doesn’t exclude you from using features such as CloudFront Functions; they will be billed separately. The only little drawback is on other features, such as WAF rules based on regex for the free plan or Lambda@Edge. There are also other unsupported features (for now). You can see the complete list here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/flat-rate-pricing-plan.html#pricing-plan-unsupported-features and the complete plan comparison here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/flat-rate-pricing-plan.html#pricing-plan-features

Even with these kinds of limitations, the new options seem fair, as other providers also offer different features at various price tiers. Here, you have the freedom of choice: you can select a plan that includes all the features you need, or opt for the option that allows you to configure everything. As the frugal architect says, “Architecting is a series of tradeoffs.”

I immediately switched this blog to the $0 plan, meaning that my bill will remain zero, considering I will also receive 20GB of S3 storage.

This is a great move for builders and small and large businesses. As builders, you can host your website (like I do) without worrying and keep experimenting without having to use different providers and tools to keep our passion economically sustainable. With the business plan, one of my customers will reduce the Data Out portion of their bill by approximately $2,000 per month.

Things to know: plans aren’t applied at the account level: you can mix and match plans for every CloudFront distribution you have. Once you select your plan and apply it to your CloudFront distribution, it will be migrated to the new plan. You can have a maximum of three 0$ plans for an account (so, yes: you cannot exploit the free plan to have infinite free storage on S3 :) ) You can have a maximum of 100 plans for every AWS account, but as always, limits can be adjusted and overcome in the future.

Additional details and ideas have emerged during the NDA session for Community Builders, and I’m sure that new features will be available. We only have to wait, but for now, you can go and evaluate which plan is better for you.

You can find additional technical details in the official blog article: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/introducing-flat-rate-pricing-plans-with-no-overages/

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, or feel free to write me on LinkedIn for a chat!