Cloud costs · CloudFront and S3
CloudFront vs S3 transfer cost calculator.
Data that goes from S3 to CloudFront is not charged, and CloudFront has its own free allowance and rate card. Enter traffic and cache hit ratio to see which route costs less.
Delivering 2,000 GB and 5 million HTTPS requests a month from a US East bucket costs $173.00 straight from S3 and $83.16 through CloudFront at a 90% cache hit ratio, a difference of $89.84 in favour of CloudFront.
Your numbers
Result
Method and limits
S3 direct. Internet data transfer out at the regional tiered rate (after the 100 GB allowance) plus S3 GET requests at the Standard rate for the bucket's region.
Through CloudFront. CloudFront data transfer out at its own tiered rate (after the 1 TB monthly allowance), plus its per-request fee ($0.00000075 per HTTP and $0.000001 per HTTPS request in the US and Canada, $0.0000009 and $0.0000012 in Europe), plus S3 GET requests only for the cache misses. Data transferred from S3 to CloudFront is not charged. CloudFront US, Canada and Europe all price transfer at $0.085 per GB for the first 10 TB, then $0.08, $0.06, $0.04, $0.03, $0.025 and $0.02 at higher volumes.
Not included. Origin Shield, CloudFront Functions or Lambda@Edge, invalidations beyond the free quota, logging, other price regions, the flat-rate CloudFront plans and taxes. The cache hit ratio is applied to requests; a CDN also changes latency and what you can protect, which this page does not price.
Price date. List prices in USD, on-demand and pay-as-you-go, retrieved 2026-10-16 and stored in this page. Providers change prices without notice, so confirm on the provider's pricing page before you commit spend. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Sources
- AWS Price List, AmazonCloudFront offer (retrieved 2026-10-16): CloudFront data transfer tiers, request prices and the free allowances.
- AWS Price List, AWSDataTransfer offer, US East (N. Virginia) (retrieved 2026-10-16): S3 internet data transfer tiers and the 100 GB free allowance.
- AWS Price List, AmazonS3 offer, US East (N. Virginia) (retrieved 2026-10-16): S3 GET request price.
- Amazon S3 pricing (retrieved 2026-10-16): no charge for data transferred from S3 to CloudFront.
FAQ
Is CloudFront cheaper than serving from S3?
Not always. At 2,000 GB a month with a 90% hit ratio the totals are $173.00 and $83.16; at 50 TB and 200 million requests they are $4,372.70 and $4,167.28. The free allowances, the per-request fee and the cache hit ratio decide it.
Is data transfer from S3 to CloudFront charged?
No. The Amazon S3 pricing page lists data transferred out to CloudFront as free. You pay CloudFront for what it delivers to viewers.
What is the CloudFront free tier?
The AWS Price List shows the first 1 TB of data transfer out and the first 10 million requests a month at $0.
Why do requests matter so much?
CloudFront charges per request on top of transfer, while S3 direct charges a smaller GET fee. Lots of small files can make CloudFront costlier than S3 alone until the transfer savings catch up.
Does the cache hit ratio change the bill?
Yes, only through S3 GET requests: every miss is a GET to your bucket. Transfer from S3 to CloudFront stays free, so a low hit ratio costs requests rather than egress.