Key Highlights
AWS is the one major cloud provider that declined to join Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance, the program that gives Azure, GCP, and other providers free or discounted egress to Cloudflare's network, meaning AWS origin traffic behind Cloudflare still bills at full rate.
A workload with a 60% cache hit ratio serving 100TB/month through Cloudflare still generates 40TB of AWS origin egress, roughly $3,600/month, that never appears on the Cloudflare invoice at all.
Running AWS and Cloudflare together means reconciling two completely separate billing systems, with no shared tagging schema, to answer one simple question: what did this workload actually cost?
The multi-cloud cost problem isn't the second platform's price tag; it's that most teams only ever look at one bill at a time.
Cloudflare's zero-egress pricing is genuinely one of the best deals in cloud infrastructure right now. It's also, by itself, an incomplete picture of what running AWS and Cloudflare together actually costs, because the "zero" only applies to Cloudflare's side of the traffic.
Why AWS and Cloudflare Together Creates Hidden Multi-Cloud Costs
AWS Egress Still Costs Money, Even When Cloudflare's Side Is Free
Most teams running AWS behind Cloudflare's CDN assume the zero-egress story applies end to end. It doesn't. Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance, the program that waives or discounts egress for partner providers, includes Azure, Backblaze, DigitalOcean, and over a dozen others, but AWS was invited and declined to join. That means every cache miss that pulls from an AWS origin still bills at AWS's standard $0.09/GB rate, in full, regardless of how the traffic leaves Cloudflare's network afterward.
The math adds up fast: a workload with a 60% cache hit ratio serving 100TB/month through Cloudflare still generates 40TB of origin egress from AWS, roughly $3,600 a month, and none of it shows up on the Cloudflare invoice. A team reviewing only their Cloudflare bill would reasonably conclude their CDN costs nothing. The AWS bill tells a different story, and almost nobody is looking at both side by side.
Redundant Security and CDN Spend Across Both Platforms
Running AWS and Cloudflare together often means paying twice for overlapping capability. Shield Advanced on AWS starts at $3,000/month with an annual commitment; Cloudflare's DDoS protection is unmetered on every plan, including free. Teams that adopt Cloudflare for its CDN and security layer but never turn off or downgrade the equivalent AWS service end up carrying both costs simultaneously, one active, one redundant.
Fragmented Billing Makes Cost Allocation Nearly Impossible
AWS Cost Explorer and Cloudflare's billing dashboard use entirely different units, different tagging conventions, and different billing cycles. Neither system knows the other exists. A team trying to answer "what did this product feature actually cost us" has to manually reconcile AWS compute and storage costs against Cloudflare's plan and usage fees, a process that gets harder, not easier, the more both platforms scale independently.
How to Manage Costs When Running AWS and Cloudflare Together
Track Cross-Provider Egress as Its Own Cost Category
Origin egress from AWS to Cloudflare deserves its own line item in any cost review, not a buried subcategory inside general data transfer. Since Cloudflare's own bandwidth-cost guidance recommends checking origin egress specifically for workloads with less-than-ideal cache hit ratios, this is worth reviewing before assuming Cloudflare adoption alone solved a bandwidth cost problem.
Allocate Shared Multi-Cloud Spend to the Teams Actually Using It
The same allocation discipline that applies to a single AWS account applies here, just harder. Splitting shared infrastructure costs, a CDN layer, a security tier, a shared origin, across product teams using proportional usage metrics is the same kind of exercise covered in breaking down cost allocation for shared infrastructure; it just now has to account for spend sitting in two separate billing systems instead of one.
Normalize Cost Data Before Comparing Anything Across Providers
AWS and Cloudflare don't just bill differently; they measure differently: per-GB egress on one side, plan-based pricing with usage overages on the other. Getting a true combined cost figure means converting both into a common unit before any comparison means anything, the same normalization challenge that shows up across any comprehensive multi-cloud cost visibility effort, whether the second provider is Cloudflare, Azure, or GCP.
Investigate Cost Spikes With Both Providers in the Picture
A cost spike that looks like it originated on Cloudflare might actually trace back to a cache configuration change that increased AWS origin egress, or vice versa. Treating the two platforms as separate investigation silos is exactly the pattern that turns a five-minute root-cause check into hours of cross-referencing dashboards, the same dynamic covered in why cost investigations take longer than they should, just with a second billing system added to the search.
Where Opsolute Fits In
Opsolute connects AWS billing and infrastructure data with the context needed to see the full cost of decisions like adding Cloudflare in front of an AWS origin, including the origin egress that never shows up on Cloudflare's own invoice. That means a cache-hit-ratio change or an origin configuration update shows up alongside its actual AWS cost impact, instead of being reconstructed later from two separate billing exports.
The Bottom Line
Cloudflare's zero-egress pricing is real and valuable. It's also only half the invoice when AWS is the origin behind it. The hidden cost of running AWS and Cloudflare together isn't a hidden fee, it's the assumption that one platform's pricing story covers the whole picture, when the two systems were never designed to be read together in the first place.
Want to see your AWS costs, including the egress Cloudflare doesn't show you, in one place? Book a 30-minute demo and see how Opsolute connects AWS billing with the infrastructure context behind it.
