Fastly

What Fastly CDN actually is

Fastly is a programmable content delivery network built on a deliberately unusual network design: fewer, larger, software-defined points of presence rather than thousands of small ones. Fastly, Inc. was founded in March 2011 by Artur Bergman (previously CTO at Wikia) and Simon Wistow, is headquartered in San Francisco, trades on Nasdaq as FSLY, and reported revenue of US$624.0 million for 2025 with about 1,140 employees. The cache layer is a heavily modified Varnish, and the configuration layer is VCL — Varnish Configuration Language — plus the option to run your own code at the edge, which is why Fastly appears in our edge computing listings alongside our CDN category.

The customer list is part of the pitch and part of the reality: GitHub, Spotify and the New York Times are among the names that have run on Fastly, and the network serves about 5 trillion requests a day by the company's count. It is a public company with public numbers, which we count as a transparency advantage: revenue, headcount and network capacity are auditable rather than implied, and the network map carries an explicit date rather than a vague 'global' claim. It is not the cheapest CDN on our comparison pages, and it does not try to be. The reason engineering-led organizations pick Fastly is control. VCL lets you write request-routing, cache-key, shielding and header logic that generic CDNs will not expose; real-time log streaming pushes telemetry to your own observability stack as requests happen; and Instant Purge invalidates content globally with a mean purge time under 150 milliseconds as of December 31, 2025.

Pricing: what you really pay

Since November 2025 Fastly's self-serve pricing is usage-based with a real free tier (a valid credit card is required). Every month the first 100 GB of bandwidth is free in every region, the first 500,000 requests are free, and TLS certificates for five domains are included. Beyond that, bandwidth is billed per GB per region: $0.12 per GB in North America and Europe for the 100 GB to 10 TB band, $0.08 per GB for the next 10 TB, $0.16 in Mexico, $0.19 in Asia, Australia, South America and Saudi Arabia, and $0.28 in Africa, India and South Korea. Requests are metered per 10,000 with volume tiers: Fastly's own table runs from $1.00 per 10,000 in the first paid band down to $0.015 per 10,000 beyond 15 billion monthly requests, though several reviewers quote roughly $0.01 per 10,000 — a discrepancy worth resolving with sales before you model a large deployment.

The add-on lines are published too. Storage (Object Store) includes 5 GB free and then $0.02 per GB up to 50 TB. TLS beyond the five included domains costs $20 per domain per month, and mutual TLS beyond two domains is $500 per month. Next-Gen WAF pricing is not published. Enterprise contracts are custom, and accounts created before November 4, 2025 keep legacy pricing of $50 per month plus usage.

Our practical read: Fastly's per-GB rates are mid-market — above budget CDNs for Asia/Africa traffic, competitive in North America and Europe at volume — but the metering is honest and the free allowance genuinely covers a small production site. The request-tier table rewards efficient cache behavior, which is the right incentive. Where costs surprise people is regional skew (a site with heavy Indian or African traffic pays more than double the NA/EU rate) and TLS add-ons.

Performance & infrastructure

The network is the product. Fastly's map (updated June 30, 2026) lists city-level PoPs across North America (Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and roughly twenty more), South America (eight including São Paulo, Bogotá and Buenos Aires), Europe (twenty-two including London, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Stockholm), Africa (Accra, Cape Town, Johannesburg), Asia (a deep Indian footprint — Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi and dozens more — plus Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur and Middle East locations in Dubai and Riyadh), and Australia/New Zealand (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Auckland and others). Budapest, Jakarta, Lagos and Nairobi are listed as coming soon. Connected global capacity is 622 Tbps.

Fewer, bigger PoPs is a real engineering position, not an excuse: high-density sites near major internet exchange points, SSD-based servers and Tier 1 transit are meant to raise cache hit ratios rather than chase metro count. Protocol coverage is complete — HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 with QUIC, and TLS 1.0 through 1.3 — and IPv6 is fully integrated: dual-stack service maps are available on shared and dedicated maps, IPv6 Anycast on request, and Fastly peers over AS 54113 with IPv4 and IPv6. Security is not an afterthought: unlimited layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation is included on every account, with Next-Gen WAF, bot mitigation and TLS management in the product stack.

We have not run Fastly through our own benchmark suite, so we will not quote throughput or TTFB numbers beyond what the company publishes (sub-millisecond 99th-percentile TTFB on its own measurement, mean purge under 150 ms). Our benchmarks page shows what we tested ourselves; treat vendor network figures accordingly.

Where it falls short

Complexity, first. Fastly exposes machinery other CDNs hide: VCL is a real language with a real learning curve, cache-key and shielding decisions have real consequences, and misconfiguration is easy. For a WordPress site needing "make it fast", Cloudflare or Bunny will get you there faster and cheaper. Fastly's power is aimed at teams that want to program the edge.

Second, cost at regional skew. Asia and Africa bandwidth at $0.19 to $0.28 per GB is roughly double the North America rate, and if your traffic lives there, the bill reflects it. Combined with per-request charges and TLS add-ons, a high-traffic, low-cache-hit workload can cost substantially more than a flat-rate competitor.

Third, self-serve limits. The free tier requires a credit card, the first Compute deploy starts a free trial with reduced limits, and some features on free accounts require contacting support. Legacy $50/month accounts sit on different terms than new sign-ups, which makes the landscape of "what Fastly costs" genuinely two-tiered depending on when you joined.

Finally, the WAF and some security features are enterprise-quoted rather than published, so full-platform cost is only knowable through a sales conversation. We prefer prices on pages. And as with every CDN, performance for your audience is what matters, not the network map: measure from your own regions before committing traffic. Fastly's own figures (sub-millisecond 99th-percentile TTFB, mean purge under 150 ms) are vendor measurements on vendor workloads; your cache-hit ratio will decide whether the per-GB bill feels fair. A disciplined setup with shielding and sensible cache keys typically wins here, and an undisciplined one pays per-request prices for traffic it could have served from cache.

Who should pick this

We would pick Fastly when you need CDN plus programmable edge logic in one control plane: engineering-led content platforms, media and publishing with instant purge requirements, e-commerce with complex cache personalization, and API-heavy products wanting shielding and real-time logs into their own observability stack. If cache-hit ratio and purge speed are revenue-relevant, Fastly's design genuinely helps, and the free tier makes it easy to prototype.

On support: self-serve accounts get standard support channels, while enterprise contracts add dedicated guidance — if you need hand-holding, price the enterprise tier in. We would skip it for simple brochure sites, for audiences concentrated in the most expensive regions without a budget for it, and for teams without someone comfortable owning VCL and cache architecture. If all you need is TLS termination and static caching, a cheaper CDN is the rational pick.

Key takeaways

• Programmable CDN built on a modified Varnish with VCL configuration, real-time log streaming and Instant Purge (mean global purge under 150 ms)
• Founded March 2011 in San Francisco by Artur Bergman; publicly traded (FSLY), US$624.0 million revenue in 2025
• Deliberately fewer, larger PoPs — over 100 city-level locations and 622 Tbps connected capacity as of June 2026, with a deep Indian and European footprint
• Honest usage pricing with a real free tier: 100 GB bandwidth, 500,000 requests and five TLS domains free monthly; then $0.12/GB NA/EU, $0.08/GB at 10 TB+, up to $0.28/GB in Africa, India and South Korea
• IPv6 dual-stack, HTTP/3 and QUIC supported; unlimited layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation included on every account
• Best fit for engineering-led teams that will actually use VCL and edge logic; wrong fit for simple sites that just need caching

Sources

• https://www.fastly.com/pricing
• https://www.fastly.com/network-map
• https://www.fastly.com/company
• https://www.fastly.com/blog/ipv6-fastly
• https://www.fastly.com/blog/its-free-instant-and-yours-fastlys-free-developer-accounts-are-here
• https://www.fastly.com/documentation/guides/getting-started/concepts/using-fastlys-global-pop-network
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastly
• https://whichdevtool.com/tools/fastly
• https://cdncost.com/fastly-pricing
• https://apis.io/plans/fastly/fastly-plans-pricing