When Does Decentralized Delivery Actually Save You Money?

"Does decentralized delivery save you money" doesn't have one answer, because "compared to what" changes the answer completely. AIOZ Stream's delivery rate is a flat $0.02 per GB. Whether that's cheaper depends entirely on which alternative you're pricing it against and how much you're actually delivering, and the honest comparison looks different for almost every CDN you'd consider switching from.

TL;DR:

• AIOZ Stream's delivery rate is a flat $0.02/GB with no volume tiers.
• Against AWS CloudFront's published list price ($0.085/GB at small scale, down to $0.02-0.03/GB only above roughly a petabyte a month), AIOZ Stream is cheaper for the vast majority of real-world usage.
• Against Cloudflare's core CDN plans, bandwidth for standard cacheable HTTP delivery isn't metered per GB at all, so the comparison isn't really about price per gigabyte in the first place.
• At genuinely massive scale, enterprise CDN customers can negotiate below list price, and what they actually pay isn't public, so treat any single-number "always cheaper" claim skeptically, including this one.

AIOZ Stream's actual rate

The published rate is $0.02 per GB delivered, flat, billed from the same AIOZ token wallet as storage and transcoding. No tier to qualify for, no minimum commitment, no negotiation.

Against AWS CloudFront's list price

AWS's own published CloudFront data transfer pricing for the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe starts at $0.085 per GB for the first 10TB a month (after a 1TB free allowance), then steps down as volume grows: $0.080/GB for the next 40TB, $0.060/GB for the next 100TB, $0.040/GB for the next 350TB, and further reductions after that, eventually reaching $0.02/GB only above roughly 5 petabytes a month. At every tier below multi-petabyte scale, which covers nearly every business that isn't already one of the largest streaming platforms in the world, AWS's list price is higher than AIOZ Stream's flat $0.02/GB, in some cases by more than 4x.

Against Cloudflare's core CDN

This is the comparison that doesn't reduce to a single number. Cloudflare doesn't meter bandwidth on its Free, Pro, or Business plans for standard cacheable HTTP delivery; it's bundled into a flat monthly plan fee instead of billed per GB. That means for straightforward video delivery through Cloudflare's core CDN, "cost per gigabyte" isn't really the axis to compare on, because Cloudflare isn't charging on that axis in the first place. The tradeoff for a flat plan fee is a different kind of ceiling: Cloudflare's own published policy reserves the right to restrict CDN use for accounts serving video or a disproportionate share of large files on the core plans, and requires a paid service like Stream for that use case instead. So the unmetered bandwidth on Free, Pro, or Business isn't an unlimited, no-questions-asked substitute for a dedicated video delivery product, it's scoped to a website's ordinary page content. Where per-GB billing does show up on Cloudflare is in adjacent metered products, like Argo Smart Routing at $0.10 per GB, which solves a different problem (route optimization) than raw delivery volume. Cloudflare's own plans page confirms the structure: Free, Pro, and Business tiers are priced as flat monthly fees with bandwidth included, not metered usage, which is the reason a straight per-GB comparison against AIOZ Stream doesn't map cleanly onto this specific competitor the way it does against AWS.

Two volumes, worked out

At 5TB (5,000GB) delivered in a month: AIOZ Stream comes to $100. AWS CloudFront's list price, after the 1TB free allowance, spends the rest in the $0.085/GB tier and comes to about $340, roughly 3.4x AIOZ's rate. At 50TB a month, AIOZ Stream is $1,000. AWS's list price crosses through the $0.085, $0.080, and $0.060 tiers on the way there and lands around $3,970, roughly 4x AIOZ's rate. The gap doesn't close as volume grows, at least not until you're well past what AWS's own tier table covers in a single step; it takes multiple petabytes a month before AWS's list price gets back down near AIOZ's flat rate.

None of this applies to Cloudflare's core CDN plans the same way, since that bandwidth isn't metered per GB to begin with, which is exactly why the two comparisons in this article have to stay separate instead of collapsing into one universal number.

Why a tiered CDN discounts with volume, and AIOZ doesn't

AWS's stepped pricing exists because a traditional CDN's cost structure genuinely improves with scale: fixed infrastructure investment gets amortized over more traffic, so AWS can afford to discount heavier customers while protecting margin on smaller ones who pay the full list rate. A DePIN-based network doesn't have that same fixed-infrastructure-to-amortize dynamic in the first place, since node operators are paid per unit of bandwidth or storage they actually contribute, not for maintaining idle company-owned capacity waiting to be filled. That's the structural reason AIOZ Stream can publish one flat rate for every account instead of needing a volume ladder to protect margin on small customers: there's no large fixed cost sitting behind the rate that only pays off once enough volume flows through it.

A third volume, where the picture flips

The two examples above both favor AIOZ Stream, so it's worth showing a scale where that isn't automatic. At 2 petabytes a month, well into AWS CloudFront's deepest volume tier, its list price lands close to $0.02-0.03/GB, roughly in the same range as AIOZ Stream's flat rate rather than clearly above it. Nobody running a mid-sized video product hits that volume, it's the territory of platforms already operating at a scale most businesses never reach, but pretending the gap holds at every volume forever would be the same kind of oversimplification this article is trying to avoid on the other side of the comparison. The honest range is: AIOZ Stream's flat rate beats AWS's list price by a wide margin from zero up through the high hundreds of terabytes a month, and the advantage narrows, though doesn't fully disappear, only once you're operating at a scale that puts you in AWS's own most aggressive negotiated territory to begin with.

The honest answer

If your current setup is metered CDN egress at anything resembling AWS's list price, AIOZ Stream's flat $0.02/GB is very likely cheaper, and the gap is largest for smaller and mid-sized accounts paying the highest per-GB tiers. If your current setup is Cloudflare's bundled-bandwidth core CDN, the savings argument doesn't really apply, because you're not being charged per GB to begin with; the case for switching there is about what else the same network gives you (storage and compute on the same account, not a separate CDN relationship), not a lower delivery bill. And if you're already a large enough customer to have negotiated a custom AWS or Cloudflare enterprise contract, nobody outside that negotiation knows your actual rate, so the honest move is to compare AIOZ's published $0.02/GB against your own invoice, not against a list price neither of you is actually paying.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AIOZ Stream always cheaper than a traditional CDN for delivery?
No. It's cheaper than AWS CloudFront's published list price at almost every realistic volume, but Cloudflare's core CDN plans don't meter bandwidth per GB at all, so that comparison isn't about price per gigabyte in the same way.

At what point does AWS CloudFront's price catch up to AIOZ Stream's?
Only at very high volume, roughly above a petabyte a month, where AWS's tiered discounts bring the list price down near $0.02-0.03/GB. Below that, AIOZ Stream's flat rate is cheaper.

Does Cloudflare really not charge for bandwidth at all?
Not for standard cacheable HTTP delivery on its Free, Pro, and Business plans; that bandwidth is bundled into the flat plan fee. Other Cloudflare products, like Argo Smart Routing, do bill per GB.

Are these AWS and Cloudflare numbers what large enterprise customers actually pay?
No. These are published list prices. Large customers regularly negotiate custom rates that aren't public, so a real comparison for an enterprise account should use that account's actual invoice, not the list price.

Can I just serve video through Cloudflare's regular unmetered plans?
Not really, without risk. Cloudflare's own published policy reserves the right to restrict CDN use for accounts serving video or a disproportionate share of large files on the core plans, and points that use case toward a paid service like Stream instead.

If delivery is cheaper, does that mean the whole bill is cheaper?
Not necessarily on its own. Delivery is one line item; the full cost breakdown also covers storage and transcoding, which have their own separate comparisons.

Why can AIOZ Stream offer one flat rate instead of a volume discount ladder?
Because a DePIN network's costs don't scale the same way a traditional CDN's do. Node operators get paid per unit of bandwidth they actually contribute, not for maintaining fixed, company-owned infrastructure that only pays for itself above a certain volume, which is what tiered discounting on a traditional CDN is compensating for.

Related Reading

• Decentralized Storage vs Centralized Cloud for Video: the durability/dependency tradeoff behind the cost numbers here
• AIOZ Stream Pricing Explained: the full rate card across storage, delivery, and transcoding
• AIOZ Stream Transcoding Pricing vs AWS and Google Cloud: the same honest-comparison approach applied to transcoding specifically
• One DePIN, Three Workloads: why storage, compute, and delivery sharing one network matters beyond just the delivery bill

References

• AWS CloudFront Pricing 2026: Data Transfer Out Per GB by Region: the tiered list-price breakdown used above
• Cloudflare Pricing Plans Explained 2026: confirms bandwidth is unmetered on Cloudflare's core CDN plans