Fourteen days, fifty dollars or a terabyte — the CDN trial landscape compared, and a test plan that extracts a real evaluation before the clock runs out.
Winner depends on your workload.
Winner depends on: what you need to learn. Permanent free tiers (Cloudflare, Gcore's 1 TB/month, CloudFront's 1 TB free allowance) answer 'does it work'; time-boxed full-feature trials (CDN77's 14 days with WAF and shield open, Bunny and KeyCDN's no-card starts, Fastly's $50 credit) answer 'how does it operate under my traffic' — the more valuable question, if you arrive with a test plan.
Two species of free
Vendors give delivery away in two shapes. The permanent free tier is a product in itself — Cloudflare's famous unmetered plan, Gcore's monthly free traffic allowance, CloudFront's always-free first terabyte and ten million requests — designed to be outgrown rather than to expire. The time-boxed trial is an evaluation window: fourteen days at Bunny, KeyCDN and CDN77 (the latter with premium features like WAF and origin shield open during the trial), a $50 usage credit at Fastly. The two answer different questions, and confusing them wastes the window.
| Provider | On-ramp | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Permanent free plan | Unmetered delivery and DDoS protection; terms steer heavy media elsewhere, and the serious limits are feature gates, not gigabytes |
| Amazon CloudFront | Always-free allowance | 1 TB out and 10M requests monthly, plus flat-rate plans from $0 introduced in late 2025 |
| Gcore | Permanent free tier | Around 1 TB/month of traffic, network strongest in Europe; a genuine production-grade freebie for EU-heavy sites |
| Bunny.net | 14-day trial, no card | Full platform access; $1/month account minimum after conversion |
| KeyCDN | 14-day trial, no card | Trial traffic allowance (~25 GB); pay-as-you-go from $0.04/GB after |
| CDN77 | 14-day trial | Premium features open during trial — the rare chance to test WAF and shielding before contract talk |
| Fastly | Trial credit (~$50) | Enough to exercise VCL, instant purge and real-time logs on modest traffic |
| Akamai | No self-serve CDN trial | Evaluation runs through sales or a partner/reseller — which is where advisors earn their keep |
What a fortnight can actually prove
Fourteen days is ample for the four measurements that matter, provided you send real traffic — mirror a low-risk hostname or a static asset path, never a synthetic-only test. One: latency where your users are, from RUM, not the vendor's map. Two: purge-to-global-effect time, stopwatch in hand. Three: log arrival latency and schema quality into your own bucket. Four: a support ticket of medium difficulty filed at an inconvenient hour — trial-period support is the best support you will ever receive, so treat its speed as your ceiling, not your baseline. What a trial cannot prove: behavior at your peak concurrency, billing accuracy at volume, and how renewal negotiations feel three years in — the territory of list price vs street price.
Free tiers as production strategy
Permanent free tiers are not just evaluation tools. A value-tier free plan can legitimately carry a small site indefinitely; more interestingly for larger estates, a free or near-free account at a second vendor is the cheapest failover insurance in the industry — configured, tested quarterly, and costing nothing until the day it earns everything, per the friendliness criteria in our multi-CDN friendliness index. The honest caveat runs the other way too: a vendor's free tier is a marketing expense, and its terms can tighten — build on the paid tier's economics, and treat the free tier as a bonus, not a plan. What the giveaway is buying from you is the subject of our free-tier economics piece. Facts verified against provider documentation, July 2026.
Want a two-week trial plan tailored to your traffic — and run against three candidates at once? That's the assessment.