Bandwidth Pricing Guardrails
Price bandwidth to protect margins while keeping usage-based billing predictable.
Quick checklist
- Separate bandwidth from storage costs.
- Price for peak usage and burst traffic.
- Use caps or tiers for extreme usage.
- Monitor margin on high-traffic customers.
- Align with any CDN or egress commitments.
Step-by-step
- Calculate per-GB egress cost.
- Add expected burst multipliers.
- Price bandwidth units to cover margin.
- Use tiers for high-volume accounts.
- Re-test pricing against current traffic mix.
Guardrails that work
- Clear pricing for overages beyond included GB.
- Rate limits for abusive spikes.
- Enterprise plans for extreme bandwidth users.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring regional egress pricing differences.
- Using storage rates for bandwidth pricing.
- Overlooking CDN pass-through charges.
