CDN contracts are short compared with enterprise software, which is exactly why the expensive parts hide in plain sight. Eight clauses decide what you will actually pay and how hard it will be to leave. Read them in this order.
1. The commit: floor, not estimate
A committed-volume contract obliges you to pay for the commitment whether you push the traffic or not. Confirm three things: the commit period (monthly commits forgive a slow month; annual commits pooled across twelve months forgive seasonality), whether unused commit rolls over, and what the true monthly floor in dollars is. A “great rate” on a commit 40% above your real volume is a worse deal than a mediocre rate at your actual usage.
2. Overage: the rate after the rate
Traffic above commit bills at an overage rate, and this is where headline pricing gets recovered. Overage at 1.5× the committed rate is common; anything above 2× is a penalty dressed as a price. Negotiate overage to equal the committed rate — providers concede this more often than they concede the base rate, and for growing traffic it is worth more.
3. What counts as a gigabyte
Contracts differ on whether you pay for edge-to-user bytes only, or also origin-to-edge fill, inter-region transfer, and TLS overhead. A 5–8% delta between your logs and the invoice is usually definition, not error. Get the measurement definition in writing and confirm which party’s logs govern disputes — then keep your own logs anyway.
4. SLA: credits are not compensation
A 100% uptime SLA with service-credit remedies means outages refund pennies against the revenue they cost you. Read for: how availability is measured (per-POP measurements can mean a whole-country outage is not a breach), the credit claim window (often 15–30 days, easy to miss), and the credit cap. Treat SLA credits as a data point about vendor confidence, not as insurance.
5. Renewal mechanics
Auto-renewal with 60–90 day notice windows is standard; auto-renewal at “then-current list rates” is a repricing trap. Calendar the notice date on signature day. Push for renewal at the same rates or with a capped increase — even a 5% cap converts the renewal conversation from a re-quote into an adjustment.
6. Exit and data
Confirm you can export configuration and certificates, that log delivery continues through the notice period, and that nothing in the contract penalizes running a second CDN in parallel during migration. A clean-exit clause costs nothing at signature and everything if it is missing at departure.
7. Support tier, in numbers
“24/7 support” without a response-time table is a phone number, not a commitment. The clause worth having: named severity levels with response times, and an escalation contact. If premium support is a paid add-on, price the deal with it included — comparing one vendor’s bundled support against another’s add-on is how spreadsheets lie.
8. The order form beats the master agreement
Rates, commits, and terms live on the order form; the master agreement is mostly boilerplate that incorporates it. When the two conflict, precedence language decides — check which document wins. Every negotiated concession must appear on the order form or in a signed amendment; a sales engineer’s email is not a contract term.