A Flat Fee for Bursty Traffic
Vercel’s Pro pricing has evolved over the past year with expanded roles, flexible credits, and access to enterprise features. But CDN costs remained a pain point: a viral launch or an aggressive crawler could turn an otherwise quiet month into a large, unexpected bill. Today, the company is addressing that with Flat Rate CDN, a new billing model for Pro teams that replaces usage-based charges with a predictable monthly fee.
Under this model, teams choose a capacity tier that fits their typical traffic profile and pay a fixed amount. Spikes in CDN requests or data transfer don't translate into overages. According to Vercel, one beta customer, Newt Travel, enabled Flat Rate CDN around the time it launched a TV campaign and no longer has to monitor CDN-related costs closely.
What the Flat Fee Covers
Flat Rate CDN is a team-level plan covering all projects. One monthly fee includes CDN Requests, Fast Data Transfer, Blob Data Transfer, and observability events generated by CDN requests. Usage is tracked across the team rather than per project.
- Fixed monthly price: A set amount for CDN usage each month.
- Spike protection: Temporary traffic surges are absorbed without additional charges.
- No overages: The bill does not increase due to usage spikes.
All new Pro teams have Flat Rate CDN enabled by default. Existing Pro teams can opt in via Billing settings, where they can also switch back to usage-based pricing at any time.
Tiers range from the included Flat Rate CDN 1M (1M requests / 1 TB data transfer) to paid options: Flat Rate CDN 10M at $20/month (10M requests / 50 TB), Flat Rate CDN 50M at $100/month (50M requests / 50 TB), and Flat Rate CDN 150M at $300/month (150M requests / 50 TB).
In one example cited by Vercel, a team with a normal usage profile that fit in the $20 tier experienced a viral product launch. Under usage-based billing, the CDN bill for that month would have reached tens of thousands of dollars; under Flat Rate CDN, it stayed at $20.
No Caps, No Throttling
Flat-rate offerings from other providers sometimes cap or throttle traffic once a customer reaches their capacity, causing degraded performance or rejected requests. Flat Rate CDN differs in two respects:
- Usage spikes are recognized and excluded when evaluating usage against tier capacity.
- The tier is automatically rightsized monthly based on sustained usage.
This means a site stays up during a viral moment without manual intervention, and teams growing quickly don't have to constantly upgrade their plan. All covered resources, including the spikes Vercel absorbs, remain visible in the Usage page in the dashboard or via the CLI.
Feedback from the Beta
Flat Rate CDN entered limited beta in May. Vercel says customers in that program reported spending less time on cost monitoring and more time on engineering. One team running hundreds of client sites called CDN costs "by far our largest line item, and the hardest to forecast," particularly with viral listings, seasonal traffic, and bot traffic. Another beta customer said the predictable billing removed the need to frequently check bot activity in Observability.
In at least one case, predictable pricing changed architecture decisions. One team told Vercel it is now considering broader use of Cache Components and other caching strategies in its Next.js setup, which it previously avoided due to the potential cost impact of additional cache traffic.
Opting In and Capacity Management
Existing Pro teams can enable Flat Rate CDN by navigating to Billing, toggling the Flat Rate CDN setting on, choosing a capacity tier, and confirming the change. Notifications are sent when usage nears the current tier's capacity.
If a team materially exceeds its tier, Vercel does not shut off traffic or charge overages. Instead, projects may be moved to the Flex CDN tier until the Flat Rate CDN tier can be rightsized at the start of the next billing cycle.
