WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
Edge runtime pricing: what Vercel, Cloudflare, and Netlify actually bill.
Edge compute has gone from novel to default between 2022 and 2025. The three providers most teams consider. Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Netlify. Publish pricing pages that look comparable and mean different things. Here are the bills from three real projects.
Project A. Marketing site, 4M monthly requests
Vercel Pro: $20 base + $0 edge function requests (within 1M) + bandwidth ~$40 = ~$60/month.
Cloudflare Workers Paid: $5 base + $0.50 per additional million requests = ~$7/month.
Netlify Pro: $19 base + edge function usage ~$25 = ~$44/month.
Cloudflare is 5 to 10x cheaper at low volume. The catch: Cloudflare's DX is not Next.js-native. If you live inside a Next.js app with Image Optimization, ISR, and preview deployments, Vercel's extra cost is buying integration, not compute.
Project B. Ecommerce, 40M monthly requests
Vercel Enterprise quote: ~$2,400/month with bandwidth pooling.
Cloudflare Workers: $5 base + $15 for 30M extra requests + bandwidth free = ~$20/month.
Netlify Enterprise quote: ~$1,800/month.
At scale, Cloudflare's pricing diverges from the others by a factor of ~100. This is why teams with cost pressure and the engineering capacity to ship on raw Workers do so.
Project C. SaaS app with database-heavy API, 12M requests
Vercel Pro: $20 base + compute usage (edge functions with significant CPU time) = $420/month.
Cloudflare Workers Paid: $5 base + $6 requests + $60 CPU time (many routes exceed 10ms) = $71/month.
Netlify Pro: $19 + edge + functions = $310/month.
For compute-heavy workloads, CPU time matters. Vercel's invoice line items for "function duration" are the single biggest source of surprise bills we see.
The not-on-the-pricing-page stuff
Bandwidth. Vercel bandwidth is $0.15/GB after the included allowance. Cloudflare is free. For image-heavy sites, this is often the largest line item.
Observability. Vercel's log drains and analytics tiers are additional. Cloudflare's workers analytics is free, logs are paid.
Cold starts on edge. All three have minimal cold starts on edge, but regional fallbacks (Vercel Functions in Lambda regions) have seconds of cold start if not kept warm.
What we actually recommend
If your team is one frontend engineer and you are on Next.js, Vercel's cost is worth the DX. If you have backend engineers and cost discipline, Cloudflare Workers is dramatically cheaper at any volume above trivial. Netlify fits a narrower band in the middle and is harder to recommend in 2025.
Sources: invoice data from three client projects, Q2 2025; Vercel pricing; Cloudflare Workers plans; Netlify pricing.