Vercel Flat Rate CDN Is GA for Pro Teams: Fixed-Tier Pricing From $100/mo

What shipped

Vercel announced Flat Rate CDN on September 8 and it's already GA for Pro teams — an alternative to usage-based CDN billing where you buy a fixed monthly capacity tier instead of watching egress dollars tick up during a viral launch.

What changed

The tiers, straight from the changelog: Pro includes 1M CDN requests and 1 TB of data transfer. The first paid tier is $100/mo for 10M requests and 50 TB — that works out to $2 per TB. Next is $300/mo for 50M requests at the same 50 TB — $6 per TB. So the unit price goes up as you climb tiers; what you're actually buying is request headroom and predictability, not cheaper bandwidth.

Capacity is pooled at the team level, not per project — one project's spike drains the shared allowance. The real headline is spike protection, on by default: traffic above your tier is served at full performance and not billed, subject to fair-use guidelines. Flat Rate also bundles Blob data transfer and observability events from CDN requests, which usage-based billing invoices separately.

Why a builder cares

This is Vercel conceding that usage-based CDN pricing was its biggest retention risk. But read the footnote before you celebrate: "not billed, subject to fair use" is an unbounded clause in Vercel's favor. If your sustained traffic is 60 TB/mo forever, $100/mo is not your price — fair use is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. Flat Rate is excellent for bursty-but-small traffic and a trap for anyone who treats the tier as a true cap. Also shipped the same day, and worth noting: Password Protection dropped from a $150/mo team-wide add-on to $20 per project per month — good news, but it signals Vercel is actively repricing the whole platform. Re-check your bill after both changes land.