Three New Members Join the Bandwidth Alliance
Cloudflare launched the Bandwidth Alliance in 2018 with a group of cloud and networking partners committed to reducing or eliminating data transfer (egress) fees between clouds and end users. The goal: let customers pick best-of-breed services without punishing cross-vendor data movement with bandwidth taxes that effectively lock them into a single provider.
This week the alliance expands to 20 partners with the addition of Alibaba Cloud, Zenlayer, and Cherry Servers. Each brings a different footprint—Alibaba for scale in Asia, Zenlayer for edge and colocation reach, and Cherry Servers for bare-metal options—so customers have more choice in how they architect storage, compute, and delivery.
Existing members including Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean are also actively onboarding customers into the program. Interested parties can reach out directly at [email protected].
Real-World Egress Savings
Two customer stories illustrate how the alliance changes cloud economics in practice.
Game Servers: Nodecraft
Nodecraft runs user-managed game servers for titles like Minecraft, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Counter-Strike. As its user base grew, so did the AWS bill—not just for storage, but for the egress fees incurred every time a server delivered data. Nodecraft moved its storage to Backblaze B2, pairing it with Cloudflare’s network. The result: content is delivered to players with no egress charges on the storage side, and the company no longer pays AWS for transfer volume it couldn't avoid.
Podcasting: Pippa.io
Pippa.io builds podcasting tools—hosting, analytics, and ad insertion—where fast, reliable delivery of large audio files is the core requirement. The company scaled to millions of audio files delivered globally, and retrieving those files from AWS S3 generated significant data transfer costs. Pippa shifted to DigitalOcean storage, which waives egress fees to Cloudflare, creating a zero-cost data bridge into Cloudflare’s global network. Combined with lower storage pricing, this cut Pippa’s total cloud bill by 50%.
Estimating Your Own Savings
To help customers gauge what they might save by moving workloads to alliance partners, Cloudflare offers an egress savings calculator. Enter your current data transfer volumes and see what the numbers look like under an alliance setup. As more partners join, the calculus becomes simpler: choose the storage and compute that fit your workload, and don't let egress fees distort the decision.
