Azion

What Azion actually is

Azion is an edge computing platform, not a VPS provider and not "just a CDN." Founded in Brazil in 2011 by Rafael Umann out of Porto Alegre, the company moved its headquarters to Palo Alto during its 2020 growth push while keeping large engineering offices in São Paulo and Porto Alegre. That history matters more than the marketing does: Azion built its network with Latin America in mind first, and it shows in both coverage and pricing. Where Cloudflare sells a global mega-network with a thin compute layer bolted on, Azion sells the whole application stack at the edge: CDN and caching, edge functions, object storage, SQL and key-value stores (in preview at the time of writing), a web application firewall with managed rules and bot management, DDoS protection, edge DNS, load balancing, and real-time observability.

We group it under edge computing, CDN providers, and serverless platforms because it genuinely spans all three. The unit of deployment is the "workload": you point an application at an origin (or an Azion Connector to a single origin), attach rules that run at the edge, and optionally hang JavaScript edge functions off requests. Functions run in JavaScript on Azion's edge runtime — there is no Python or Rust runtime to choose from, which is the first question most ML-inclined teams ask.

The platform leans hard on a rules-engine model. Rather than writing a full application server, you configure rules per application (10 included on the Hobby plan, 20 on Pro, each additional rule $0.20) that rewrite paths, redirect, set cache keys, or hand requests to functions. For content-heavy and commerce workloads this is a productive model; for teams that want to lift an arbitrary container, it is the wrong shape entirely.

Pricing: what you really pay

Three plans: Hobby (free, personal and non-commercial use only), Pro ($25/mo), and Enterprise (on-demand pricing with optional Reserved Capacity or Savings Plans). New accounts also get $300 in credit valid for 365 days, with no credit card required to sign up. That combination — a real free plan plus a generous trial credit — is one of the more honest entry points among edge platforms, and it is why the pricing model comes out as freemium-with-usage-billing rather than pure pay-as-you-go.

Underneath sits monthly tiered on-demand pricing, per region. Data transfer: first 1 TB/month free everywhere, then $0.085/GB in the US, Canada, and Europe, $0.11/GB in Brazil, and $0.198/GB in the rest of Latin America and other regions. Requests: first 10 million/month free, then $0.009 per 10,000 in the US/EU ($0.016 Brazil, $0.029 LatAm). Functions are billed on compute time ($0.072 per 1,000 seconds beyond 8 free hours/month) and invocations ($0.30 per million beyond 3 million free). Object storage is $0.023/GB after the first 10 GB, WAF requests $0.025 per 10,000 after the first 100,000 free, and each extra WAF rule set is $5.00. Network Shield and DDoS protection are included with the Firewall at no additional charge — a detail we appreciate, since DDoS pricing is where edge vendors often get vague.

The practical upshot: a small production site can run on Pro for $25/month and stay inside the included quotas (2 TB transfer, 20 million requests, 20 workloads). Costs start moving when you serve heavy media or when traffic concentrates in Latin America, where per-GB rates are roughly double the US/EU tier. We consider that regional surcharge defensible — delivering in Brazil is genuinely more expensive — but you should model it before committing, not after the first invoice.

Performance & infrastructure

Azion states "100+ data centers" on its pricing comparison, and the platform fronts them with automatic routing, load balancing, and failover across locations. Regional presence is the differentiator: Azion runs a serious Brazilian and Latin American footprint alongside US, European, and other global locations. For audiences in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, or Mexico City, we would expect Azion to hold up well against larger names on latency; for a mostly-Asian audience, we would look elsewhere first. Our own measured numbers at /benchmarks cover compute hosts, not edge CDNs, so treat any edge latency claim — ours included — as something to verify against your own users.

The reliability story is mostly contractual. Azion's SLA commits to reasonable commercial efforts to keep services "100% available," with service credits of 10% for monthly availability at or above 99% but below 100%, and 25% below 99%. Credit customers must bring their own approved third-party availability monitoring data to claim. Edge DNS carries its own 99.99% SLA with automatic failover across locations. Read that credit schedule honestly: the availability target is bold, the compensation is capped at a quarter of the monthly bill, and the burden of proof sits with the customer. We have no independent incident record for Azion's network, and we will not invent one.

The tooling is better than the company's profile suggests. CLI, API, GraphQL API, Terraform provider, and MCP servers are included on every plan, plus SSO (SAML), OAuth sign-in, MFA, and RBAC. Real-time metrics and events are part of the platform, with Data Stream for shipping logs to your own systems.

Where it falls short

Reach first: Azion is a fraction as well known as Cloudflare, Fastly, or the big clouds, and that carries real costs. Smaller community, fewer third-party tutorials and integrations, fewer engineers who have operated it before, and a hiring-market reality where you are likely the only person who knows the platform. If your team values "someone on Stack Overflow has hit this bug," Azion loses to Cloudflare on that axis every time.

The pricing model is transparent per metric but fragmented across a lot of metrics: workloads, data transfer, requests, compute time, invocations, purges, rules, rule sets, exceptions, storage classes, data scans. It is all published — which we value — but budgeting means a spreadsheet, and the regional tiers (US/Canada/Europe vs Brazil vs LatAm vs Other) multiply the surface area.

Platform maturity varies by product. Core CDN, edge functions, firewall, and DNS are solid; the SQL database and key-value store are preview features (the SQL database is included in preview on Hobby and Pro), and AI inference is preview-on-request. We would not build a production system on the preview data services today. Function runtimes are JavaScript-only. And the Hobby plan's terms are explicit that it is for personal, experimental, or non-commercial use — Azion can restrict or suspend it at its sole discretion, including deleting data. Free means free until it does not.

Finally, there is no compute-and-servers story at all. No VMs, no bare metal, no GPUs for rent. If you want persistent general-purpose compute, this platform is a complement to a hosting provider, not a replacement.

Who should pick this

Our pick when the audience is in Latin America and the workload is content or commerce delivery: storefronts, media sites, API acceleration, and any application where edge rules plus a WAF solve most of the problem. Brazilian and LatAm e-commerce teams in particular get a provider that prices and performs for their region instead of treating it as an afterthought.

We'd also pick it for teams that want Cloudflare-shaped capabilities (CDN, WAF, edge functions, DNS) without concentrating everything on one vendor, and for organizations with compliance requirements — PCI DSS 4.0.1 Level 1, SOC 2 Type 2, and FIPS 140-2 Level 3 are available on Enterprise contracts.

We would not pick it for ML inference at scale (preview only), for non-JavaScript runtimes, for audiences concentrated in Asia-Pacific, or for teams that want a large community and a deep hiring pool. And if your core need is raw compute, start with a provider in our benchmarks and put Azion in front of it.

Key takeaways

• Edge platform spanning CDN, JavaScript edge functions, object storage, WAF, DDoS protection, and edge DNS — not a VPS or bare-metal provider.
• Founded in Brazil (2011), headquartered in Palo Alto, with its strongest network position in Latin America and 100+ data centers worldwide.
• Free Hobby plan plus a $300 credit for 365 days; Pro is $25/mo with 2 TB transfer and 20M requests included.
• On-demand tiers are fully published ($0.085/GB US/EU transfer, $0.198/GB LatAm beyond the free 1 TB), but fragmented across many billing metrics and regional tiers.
• SLA targets 100% availability with capped credits (10% below 100%, 25% below 99%); Edge DNS has a 99.99% SLA.
• JavaScript-only edge runtime, preview-only databases, small community — pick for LATAM delivery, not for general compute.

Sources

• https://www.azion.com/en/pricing/
• https://www.azion.com/en/documentation/products/pricing/
• https://www.azion.com/en/documentation/agreements/azion-plans-terms-and-conditions/
• https://www.azion.com/en/documentation/accounts/billing-and-subscriptions/
• https://azion.com/en/documentation/agreements/sla
• https://azion.com/en/products/edge-dns
• https://www.azion.com/en/documentation/products/build/applications/functions/
• https://cbinsights.com/company/azion-1
• https://yespress.io/azion