Vercel Flat Rate CDN Makes Traffic Bills Predictable

Vercel Pro's CDN line can now be predictable, but your whole Vercel bill still isn't. On September 8, 2026, Vercel made Flat Rate CDN generally available: the included capacity covers 1 million requests and 1 TB a month, while temporary traffic spikes above your tier are served without an extra CDN charge, subject to fair use.

The bill changed from a meter to a capacity decision

A content delivery network, or CDN, serves your site's pages, images, and other responses from locations close to the visitor. Under Vercel's on-demand model, CDN requests and transferred data become unit-priced usage after the included amounts run out.

Flat Rate CDN changes that one part of the bill. You choose a monthly capacity tier based on normal traffic, then pay the listed CDN capacity price instead of paying separately for every covered request and byte.

Those are CDN capacity prices, not complete Vercel Pro prices. The distinction matters enough to keep in view through the whole decision.

New Pro teams start with Flat Rate CDN enabled. Existing Pro teams can opt in from Billing settings. If you aren't on Pro, this particular setting is not your billing decision.

Capacity is also team-wide. If one Vercel team contains a SaaS app, a marketing site, and several client projects, they all draw from the same allowance. You aren't buying a separate bucket for each project.

The useful part is what happens during a burst. Spike protection is on by default. A one-day surge can go above the tier without an overage charge or degraded delivery. Vercel uses sustained billing-cycle usage to decide whether the team should move up at the start of the next cycle.

That makes the capacity an operating baseline, not a hard traffic ceiling. It also means today's spike and next month's budget are two different decisions.

What the fixed line covers

The current pricing guide puts five resources inside the capacity tier: CDN Requests, Fast Data Transfer, Blob Data Transfer, Sandbox Data Transfer, and Observability events generated from CDN requests. In the billing dashboard, CDN Requests appear as Edge Requests.

That list is narrower than the Vercel invoice. Pro itself has a $20 monthly platform fee with one deploying seat and $20 in monthly usage credit. Extra deploying seats cost $20 each. Function compute, Fast Origin Transfer, builds, storage operations, paid add-ons, and other product usage still follow their own billing rules.

So Flat Rate CDN removes one source of variance. It does not turn Vercel into one fixed-price subscription. The full Vercel pricing guide is still the right place to model the rest of the account.

The cost math with a clear traffic scenario

Take a hypothetical Pro team that normally serves 8 million CDN requests and transfers 2 TB in a billing cycle. This is an example for the math, not a Vercel customer measurement.

The included Flat Rate tier is too small because it carries 1 million requests and 1 TB. The $20 tier covers the normal month with room for 10 million requests and 50 TB. Its CDN capacity line is therefore $20 for that cycle.

Now give the same team a one-day launch spike. Vercel says that kind of temporary burst does not trigger a tier upgrade, so the month's CDN capacity line stays at $20, subject to the eligibility and fair-use rules.

The result changes when growth lasts. If the team sustains 12 million requests across the billing cycle, it has moved beyond the 10 million request tier. The next published tier is $100 for 50 million requests, so the next cycle's CDN capacity line can rise by $80.

That's the real contract. A surprise day no longer creates a surprise CDN overage. A bigger normal month can still create a bigger next month.

Flat rate also isn't automatically the cheapest mode. Vercel's current on-demand CDN documentation lists 10 million Edge Requests and 1 TB of Fast Data Transfer as included on Pro. The included Flat Rate tier lists 1 million requests and the same 1 TB.

For an existing Pro team whose normal transfer stays under 1 TB, whose requests fit the on-demand allowance, and whose spike risk is low, on-demand can preserve more included request headroom. Flat Rate CDN trades some of that headroom for a fixed capacity line and spike protection. Compare the two modes in Billing instead of assuming “flat” means “less.”

How this changes real teams

A solo SaaS founder planning a launch

A founder launching a product can size the tier from a normal month instead of the loudest launch day. If the product normally fits the $20 tier, a one-day wave from a launch or press mention does not rewrite that month's CDN line.

The payoff is not cheaper traffic in every case. It is knowing the CDN number before the campaign starts, then keeping separate controls on functions, builds, and other usage that the tier does not cover.

An agency carrying several client sites

An agency operator needs to think at team level. A traffic burst on one client's site draws on the same capacity as every other covered project, so the useful dashboard view is the project breakdown inside the team's total.

Vercel lets you exclude an individual non-business-critical project from Flat Rate capacity and place it on Flex CDN. The project must use Vercel DNS. That gives an agency a way to keep an experimental or lower-priority site from consuming the shared bucket, but it is a routing decision, not a second private allowance.

A SaaS engineering lead working with finance

The engineering lead can use the Usage dashboard or vercel usage to separate a single-day burst from a higher daily baseline. Finance can then treat the current tier as this cycle's known CDN line and the next tier as a forecasted step if the higher baseline holds.

That handoff is cleaner than sending finance a per-request estimate during a growth month. It still needs an owner because Vercel can rightsize the tier at the next cycle rather than leaving the old tier in place forever.

A marketing lead running a commerce campaign

A marketing lead gets a safer launch window for eligible storefront traffic. The site keeps serving through a temporary burst without a CDN overage, while the operator watches whether traffic falls back after the campaign.

The campaign budget still needs room for costs outside CDN. A promotion that drives more server work, image transformations, storage operations, or paid observability can move those lines even when the delivery line stays flat.

A media or download-product operator

This offer is not built for a product whose main job is moving files. Bulk download services, media-dominant delivery, CDN-as-storage setups, and workloads where high-volume transfer is the primary function are outside the published eligibility rules.

Do not build a media budget around the 50 TB figure and assume the workload qualifies. Vercel can move out-of-scope projects to Flex CDN, require a different plan or product, or limit service.

Set it up from the billing baseline

1. 1

   Read one normal billing cycle

   Open the team's Usage view and inspect CDN Requests, which appear as Edge Requests, plus the covered transfer resources. Break the view down by day and project. Mark a one-day event as a spike instead of treating it as the baseline.

2. 2

   Compare both billing modes

   Check normal requests and normal transfer against both sets of included allowances. Choose Flat Rate when the value of a known CDN line and spike protection beats the extra capacity price. Keep on-demand when normal usage fits its allowances and that trade is better for the team.

3. 3

   Choose capacity for the whole team

   Open team Settings, select Billing, and find Flat Rate CDN. Pick the tier that fits typical team-wide usage, not one project's average. If an eligible non-critical project should sit outside the shared capacity, move it to Flex and confirm it uses Vercel DNS.

4. 4

   Review the next-cycle exposure

   Read the subscription cost shown in Billing before you continue. Record the next tier too, because sustained cycle usage can move the team there at the next billing cycle. A later manual tier change also takes effect next cycle.

The limit behind spike protection

This is why “unlimited” is the wrong mental model. The site stays up through a burst and the burst does not become an overage invoice. That is different from permission to run a file-distribution business through the tier or to sit above its capacity indefinitely.

Your Monday move

Act this week if you run an eligible Pro app and temporary traffic makes the CDN line hard to forecast. Open Billing, compare a normal cycle with the four published tiers, and choose the smallest tier that fits both request and transfer usage.

Wait before switching if your existing on-demand allowances cover normal usage and temporary spikes are not a meaningful business risk. The request allowances differ between the two modes, so this is a price-versus-certainty decision.

This release does not solve the problem if your bill moves because of functions, builds, seats, add-ons, or an ineligible media workload. Keep those controls separate.

On Monday, leave Billing settings with one recorded decision: Flat Rate on with a named capacity tier, or on-demand kept for a stated cost reason. That is the budget change this release actually gives you.

If you want more plain-English breakdowns of the platform changes that alter your operating budget, join the newsletter.