Simpler, Better Pricing with Fastly

Originally published June 2023

Fastly customers build the best experiences for their users because we make it easy for their applications and APIs to be fast, secure, and easy to manage. If we can simplify the most advanced capabilities of the internet for our customers, shouldn’t we be able to simplify our own pricing and packaging? (The answer is YES.) Starting today we are officially launching simplified, flat-rate packages that get you more across Network Services, Security, and Compute offerings. It’s simple to try and buy Fastly with predictable billing. We’re also adding more self-service features (with even more on the way).

People love working with Fastly. Our customer retention rates are off the charts, and this is another example why they love us. Jump in with confidence that you will never be charged for overages, and never have a surprise bill that upends your budgets or eats at your revenues. No fine print. No tricks. Just great service on a smarter, more modern network, with world class customer support. 

Flat rate, predictable pricing

Our pay-per-use pricing is still available for customers who prefer it, and these new packages are not available for media / streaming businesses, but for the vast majority of our customers who value predictability and simplicity (as well as a great value), let’s look at why it’s better.

No more risk from attacks, spikes, and seasonality
Flat-rate packages protect our customers from paying for sudden spikes in bandwidth usage or huge volumes of requests that would cause financial pain in a pay-by-use situation. Spikey events and seasonality are worries of the past, and you can plan and budget safely.

No more risk from human error and misconfigurations
Accidental misconfigurations or other mistakes that drive a mountain of requests or bandwidth aren’t great, and might cause problems, but after you fix them you won’t also have to deal with a giant bill. We care about helping you provide the best end-user experience for your real traffic and usage, and we take responsibility for handling everything else. Building a trusting relationship with our customers is important to us, and anomalous events are not passed through in invoices. 

No financial penalties for your own success
Not all traffic is malicious, and if you get a viral moment or something really takes off, you’re protected from spikes in traffic, requests, computing, and bandwidth here as well. Celebrate your success without having to pay a surprise bill for overages. 

Easier approvals with finance and procurement
Predictable billing makes intra-organization processes fast, smooth, and easy when you can plan your budget without risk of surprise overages. It also makes financial planning easier when you know your costs are stable over time and wild fluctuations won’t have a surprise impact on your revenue goals. 

Customer success and support included with every package
Fastly’s world class customer support is included with every package. We are here to help you succeed every step of the way. We also provide a huge array of developer resources that make it easy and fast to get started. You can use Terraform across the Fastly platform, and we’ve also got great documentation, API references, code examples, the community forum, and instructional guides. It’s never been easier.

Beyond Bandwidth: Better Network Services

Why Fastly doesn’t charge you for bandwidth
As cloud usage has grown over years, bandwidth has become a commodity. We believe in passing on those benefits to our customers. For most businesses who aren’t in the business of media or streaming, charging based on bandwidth is a bad measure of the value you get out of a relationship with a CDN or other network services offerings. This is evident from the complicated nature of pricing, and the risk involved with overages caused by anything from a positive viral moment to an overwhelming malicious attack. Even competitors who claim to have ‘no overages’ usually do in the fine print. We’re getting rid of all of that complexity and offering easy-to-understand tiers for predictable pricing. 

Fastly customers don’t worry about paying for traffic spikes
Our DDoS protection will protect you anyway, but now you have a second layer of budgetary protection that guarantees you’ll never have to pay for a sudden influx of malicious traffic. And if everything is going great for you and your great idea takes off overnight, you don’t have to pay a penalty for a sudden spike in interest – no penalties for success. We help smooth out the curve so that you can budget for what your real traffic is over the long term rather than creating huge swings in your billing from month to month. 

Image optimization and other capabilities bundled for free
If that weren’t enough, we also bundle other capabilities into our new packages that you would normally have to contract for individually. Fastly’s Image Optimizer lets you designate a single hi-res image asset plus some defaults, and we’ll do all the transformation and optimization on the edge to send the best, most efficient version for each user request. This can deliver significant improvements for site performance and load times, while also freeing up engineering and design hours to work on more important projects. 

Better Security

If a security solution doesn’t protect your budget from attacks at least as well as it protects your infrastructure, then you’re opting in to some ransomware. Under attack? Well, pay up if you want to stay safe. The only thing better than taking advantage of the easy migration, fast deployment, and out-of-the-box value of Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF and other security capabilities, is doing it with predictable pricing. 

Fastly Security packages are designed so you can start with basic protection and easily upgrade if and when it becomes necessary, based on how much security and protection you actually need. Not everyone is a highly targeted organization like financial services, payment gateways, or healthcare institutions that may be under constant attack. We can help you pick the package that matches your needs and get your new and improved protection up and running in mere minutes or hours. There’s no lock-in with Fastly – the Next-Gen WAF is multi-cloud, can also be deployed on-prem, on the edge, or in other environments to protect all your applications and APIs for your entire tech footprint under a unified dashboard and a single, predictable invoice. 

For a bonus, combine security with a Network Services package and you’re also getting DDoS protection that mitigates denial of service attacks at the edge for more complete protection. 

Better serverless computing with Compute

Fastly’s Compute offers the only serverless compute option on the market with flat-rate billing, and a very affordable base package. This is a big deal for dev teams looking to modernize and move more of their infrastructure into a new computing environment. Getting approvals within the organization is easier when you can give them a concrete cost and assurances that there won’t be huge surprise overages as the team innovates. The competition treats their serverless compute offerings as a side project, but we know this is the future, and we’re committed to helping our customers have great, safe, cost-effective experiences as they move more of their logic to the edge.

Try before you buy with the free tier

After all of the great reasons we’ve laid out, if you’re still not quite ready to jump in and select from our packages just yet, you can get started with our free tier. Creating an account lets you run up to two domains for free, no credit card required. You get access to free, lightning-fast delivery with Fastly’s instant purge, full configurability, smart redirects, and core DDoS protection. You also get access to our serverless compute capabilities with Compute, and great Observability including real-time metrics and log streaming, request tracing, and connections into other observability tools you already use. 

If you’re not asking yourself how to move more of what you do onto Fastly today, then you are missing out on delivering the best user experience to your users, and you’re already behind your competition. 

Come to the network that makes you better. We can’t wait to help you get started - today.