Posted On: Nov 26, 2021
Effective December 1, 2021, AWS is making two pricing changes for data transfer out to the internet. Each month, the first terabyte of data transfer out of Amazon Cloudfront, the first 10 million HTTP/S requests, and the first 2 million CloudFront Functions invocations will be free. Free data transfer out of CloudFront is no longer limited to the first 12 months. In addition, the first 100 gigabytes per month of data transfer out from all AWS Regions (except China and GovCoud) will be free. Free data transfer out from AWS Regions is also no longer limited to the first 12 months. These changes will replace the existing data transfer and CloudFront AWS Free Tier offerings, and AWS customers will see these changes automatically reflected in their AWS bills going forward. All AWS customers will benefit from these pricing changes, and millions of customers will see no data transfer charges as a result.
Today, the majority of data transfer out to the internet is from customers that are hosting live video, websites, mobile applications, and APIs on AWS. Most of this traffic is served using Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s content delivery network, which securely delivers content with low latency and high availability. CloudFront is built on the AWS global network, which is the largest network in the world, with hundreds of thousands of miles of network backbone, interconnecting 300+ Points of Presences, 81 Availability Zones, and 25 Regions. Every data center, Availability Zone, and AWS Region is interconnected via a purpose-built, highly available, and low-latency private global network infrastructure. Designed for the most demanding workloads, the AWS network is built with a fully redundant 100 GbE fiber network backbone and hundreds of terabits of capacity. This enables AWS customers to benefit from a high-performance, reliable, flexible, scalable, and secure network—while reducing costs.
The CloudFront free tier is a full-service free tier, meaning customers can use all CloudFront features, such as support of website images, media workloads, and APIs, without service restrictions or data type limitations. Customers will also continue to benefit from free origin fetches from their AWS origins that are hosted on AWS Regional services to CloudFront. Compared to the current CloudFront free tier, which provides 50GB per month of free data transfer out for first 12 months, this new free tier offers 20 times the amount of free data transfer out per month and does not expire after 12 months.
Customers with use cases that transfer data directly out of AWS Regions instead of using CloudFront, such as game streaming or live text and audio communication, will benefit from an expanded offering for free data transfer out to the internet. With this price reduction, the first 100GB per month of data transferred out of an AWS Region will be free. Now, for millions of AWS customers, the portion of their AWS bill for data transfer out to the internet will be $0. The new perpetual free tier replaces the current free tier, which offers up to 1GB per month of data transfer to the internet.
In addition to the millions of customers who will benefit from free CloudFront and AWS data transfer, customers with greater than 1TB of CloudFront data transfer or greater than 100GB of AWS data transfer out to the internet will also see a meaningful reduction in their AWS bills. For instance, with the new expanded free tier, a CloudFront customer with data transfer usage of 2TB and 20 million HTTP requests monthly will see a 50% reduction in their monthly bill for Amazon CloudFront, while a customer who doesn’t use CloudFront but sends 400 GB per month directly out from AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Elastic Load balancing will see a 25% cost reduction. These price reductions cannot be combined with any other discount.
To learn more about the new price reductions going into effect, refer to the AWS News Blog, or get started now at https://aws.amazon.com/free/.