CDN image optimization add-ons compared — flat-fee, per-transform, per-request and contract pricing, and which model fits which catalogue.
Winner depends on your workload.
Winner depends on: your catalogue shape. Flat-fee (Bunny Optimizer, $9.50 per zone) wins for high-traffic sites with bounded image sets; per-unique-transform (Cloudflare Images) wins for small catalogues and punishes huge responsive ones; per-request (Fastly IO) suits high-control media estates that meter everything; contract add-ons (Akamai IVM) belong to enterprises already inside the tent.
Same feature, four billing geometries
Every product here does broadly the same work: resize, crop, convert to WebP/AVIF per client, strip metadata, and cache the result at the edge. The engineering differences are real but secondary; the billing geometry is what decides your invoice, because image workloads multiply — one original times five breakpoints times three formats is fifteen billable somethings, and what the "something" is varies completely by vendor.
| Product | Model | Published price shape |
|---|---|---|
| Bunny Optimizer | Flat fee per pull zone, unlimited transformations | $9.50/month per zone; bandwidth billed as normal CDN traffic |
| Cloudflare Images | Per unique transformation (source image × parameter set), plus storage/delivery for hosted images | 5,000 unique transforms free; $0.50 per 1,000 thereafter; hosted tier $5 per 100k stored, $1 per 100k delivered |
| Cloudflare Polish | Automatic recompression of origin images, same URLs | Included from the Pro plan; lossless/lossy plus WebP toggle, no per-image meter |
| Fastly Image Optimizer | Per image request through IO — billed on hit and miss | Paid platform add-on; every request routed through IO is billable, including non-image mistakes |
| Akamai Image & Video Manager | Enterprise contract add-on with policy-based derivatives | Contract pricing; strongest video-derivative story of the group |
| Amazon CloudFront | No native optimizer — DIY with Lambda@Edge / CloudFront Functions or AWS's solution template | You pay compute, storage and requests; total cost depends entirely on your architecture |
Where each model breaks
Flat-fee breaks last: Bunny's $9.50 covers a million transformations as happily as a hundred, which is why we call it the most predictable line item in the field — its cost curve is a horizontal line, and only per-GB delivery scales. Per-unique-transform breaks on catalogue explosion: Cloudflare's meter counts one original with one parameter set once per month regardless of traffic — genuinely generous for a small site with hot images — but an e-commerce catalogue of 50,000 SKUs times a srcset of six widths times format=auto is 300,000 unique transforms, and at $0.50 per thousand past the free 5,000 that is real money every single month, because uniqueness resets with the catalogue, not the cache. Per-request breaks on carelessness: Fastly bills IO on every request that touches it, cache hit or miss, and its own docs warn that non-image content routed through IO still counts — a misconfigured VCL condition is a self-billing bug. Contract pricing breaks on nothing except procurement patience.
The quiet middle option
Cloudflare Polish deserves its own paragraph because it is a different product philosophy: no new URLs, no transform API — the edge simply recompresses whatever images your origin already serves, strips metadata and offers WebP where the browser accepts it, bundled into the Pro plan. For a content site whose problem is "our JPEGs are 40% heavier than they need to be," Polish plus sane markup outperforms adopting a whole image platform — the dedicated-image-CDN field is a different shopping trip, one we scored in ImageEngine vs Medianova. The moment you need art direction — crops, focal points, per-device widths — you have outgrown it and are back to the matrix above.
Fitting the model to the catalogue
Run your own numbers with three inputs: distinct originals, variants per original, and monthly image requests. Bounded originals with high traffic favors Bunny or Polish. Small originals count with modest variants sits comfortably in Cloudflare Images' free-to-cheap band. Vast media libraries with device-targeted derivatives and an existing enterprise relationship point at Akamai IVM or Fastly IO, where the controls (and the meters) are the finest-grained. And on CloudFront, be honest that you are choosing to build a product, not buy one — the AVIF-versus-WebP delivery math we ran in the AVIF/WebP pipeline piece applies to whichever pipeline you assemble. Facts and prices verified against provider documentation, July 2026.
Want the transform math run on your actual catalogue before you pick an optimizer? That's exactly what the assessment does.