Fastly

High performance edge computing platform

As of 30 August 2026, Fastly is free to use. Fastly is an edge cloud platform that delivers websites and applications with high performance. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Fastly is made by Fastly Inc, launched in 2011, available on Web, API.

Visit siteVisit Fastly

Overview

What Fastly does

Fastly is an edge cloud platform that delivers websites and applications with high performance. It provides real-time visibility and insights with a focus on speed and security.

What people use it for

Serving static and dynamic content through a global CDN
Running edge logic and caching in front of an origin application

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Fastly.

Bandwidth is priced per region, and delivery to India, Africa and South Korea is $0.28 per GB against $0.12 in North America and Europe
The same traffic therefore costs more than twice as much depending on where the audience is, which is invisible until the bill arrives
The free allowance is 100 GB of bandwidth and 1M requests a month
Requests are billed separately from bandwidth, at $0.01 per 10,000 above the first million
High volume rates past 50 TB are not published and require contacting sales

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Fastly

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Fastlyvs
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean: The developer cloud
Fastlyvs
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud: Composable observability platform
Fastlyvs
Neon
Neon: Serverless Postgres for modern developers
Fastlyvs
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS (Amazon Web Services): The leading cloud computing platform

Pricing

What Fastly costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Free Trial

Free

CDN
DDoS protection
Real-time analytics
50 GB free bandwidth

Pay-As-You-Go

Free

Usage-based pricing
Advanced features
Priority support
Custom solutions

Capabilities

Features

Edge Compute
CDN
DDoS Protection
Real-time Analytics
Image Optimization
Video Streaming
API
Instant Purge
GitHub
Integration with GitHub
Terraform
Integration with Terraform
Datadog
Integration with Datadog
DDoS protection
DDoS protection security feature

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Does Fastly charge based on usage or a flat monthly fee?

Fastly operates on a usage-based model with volume discounts. They offer a free tier with 100 GB bandwidth and 1M requests for experimentation, then customers pay per unit consumed with tiered discounts as consumption increases.

Source

What are Fastly's main service packages and their costs?

Fastly offers Network Services Packages ($1,500-$6,000/month baseline), Security Packages (custom pricing), Compute Packages ($500/month entry level), and Observability Packages ($1,500/month entry level). Enterprise solutions include custom quotes for high-volume deployments.

Source

Can I start using Fastly for free?

Yes, Fastly offers a free tier with generous allowances for experimentation including 100 GB bandwidth and 1M requests. You can start building free and only pay when you use additional resources.

Source

Are there surprise overage charges with Fastly?

Fastly advertises predictable pricing with no surprise overages. The pricing structure is designed to be transparent as consumption grows.

Source

Behind it

Who makes Fastly

Company: Fastly Inc
Based in: San Francisco, CA

Keep looking

Where to go from Fastly

Best Cloud software for

Compare Fastly with

Other Cloud software

AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The leading cloud computing platform
Free plan12 researched notes
DigitalOcean
The developer cloud
Free, then $4/mo12 researched notes
Grafana Cloud
Composable observability platform
Free, then $19/mo13 researched notes
Neon
Serverless Postgres for modern developers
Free plan10 researched notes
Akamai
Leading content delivery and security platform
From $1,000/mo8 researched notes
HAProxy
High-performance TCP and HTTP load balancer
Open source9 researched notes
Fly.io
Deploy web applications globally
From $29/mo14 researched notes
K3s
Lightweight certified Kubernetes distribution in a single binary
Open source9 researched notes
Podman
Daemonless container engine with a Docker-compatible CLI
Open source9 researched notes
Vault
Manage Secrets and Protect Sensitive Data
Free plan13 researched notes
Jaeger
Open-source end-to-end distributed tracing
Open source8 researched notes
Heroku
Cloud Application Platform
From $5/mo13 researched notes
Beam Cloud
Serverless GPU computing with sub-second cold starts and multi-cloud support
Free, then $89/mo10 researched notes
Caddy
Web server with automatic HTTPS by default
Open source8 researched notes
Cerebrium
Serverless GPU infrastructure for real-time AI inference and applications
Free, then $100/mo10 researched notes
DeepInfra
Low-cost cloud API for running open-source AI models
From $0.08/mo11 researched notes
Buildah
Build OCI container images without a daemon or a Dockerfile
Open source8 researched notes
Vault
Manage Secrets and Protect Sensitive Data
Free plan13 researched notes

Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Fastly, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.