How bunny.net billing works and how to cap CDN bandwidth

How the prepaid balance and negative balances work

Bunny.net is a prepaid service. Charges get deducted from your balance as you use services, but usage is billed after it happens in short intervals. If you burn through more bandwidth between two billing runs than your remaining credits cover, your account drops below zero.

A lot of developers assume a prepaid balance acts as an automatic circuit breaker. It doesn't. If your balance runs out, bunny.net continues charging for your usage, your balance becomes negative, and you remain responsible for every dollar incurred while your account is in the red. That can be an issue if you are hit by a denial-of-wallet attack or a runaway script that pulls large assets repeatedly.

When your balance goes below zero, bunny.net triggers four specific stages:

1. Daily notifications. You get daily emails about the negative balance, and a warning appears across the dashboard.
2. Auto-Recharge runs. If you have Auto-Recharge enabled, the system tries to pull enough money to clear the debt and bring you back to your selected target balance.
3. Resource freeze. As soon as your balance hits zero or drops below it, you cannot create new resources until you add funds and your balance turns positive again.
4. Account disabling. If your balance stays negative for 4 days, bunny.net disables your account. The platform can also disable it earlier if your account is new or if the negative balance is unusually large.

When your account is disabled, all your services go offline immediately and usage charges stop. Bunny.net keeps your files, configurations, and zone settings intact, and you can still log into the dashboard to add funds. Topping up enough money to bring your balance to zero or above immediately re-enables your account and brings your zones back online, with the owed amount deducted from your top-up.

Keep an eye on the clock if you leave an account disabled. If an account stays disabled for 60 days, bunny.net permanently deletes all stored data, including storage zones, video libraries, and Magic Containers apps and volumes. They start sending warning emails 30 days before that final deletion date, but once those 60 days pass, the data cannot be recovered.

Fixed costs that charge even when your balance is negative

Disabling your services stops CDN bandwidth billing, but it does not stop fixed recurring costs. Bunny.net has a $1 minimum monthly usage charge. If your bandwidth and storage usage add up to less than $1 in a month, you are still charged the difference to hit that $1 floor.

Certain charges do not depend on network traffic. They continue running while your balance is negative and while your account is disabled, for as long as the resource exists or the feature is turned on:

• The $1 minimum monthly usage charge
• Storage zones and Stream video storage (billed per GB stored)
• Magic Containers persistent volumes and attached Anycast IPs
• Database storage

To stop those charges while an account is negative or disabled, you have to log in and delete the resources or turn off the features. If you leave storage zones or volumes sitting in a disabled account, they will keep running up charges until the 60-day deletion deadline hits.

Bunny CDN bandwidth pricing: Standard vs Volume

Bunny CDN has two pricing tiers: Standard and Volume. Neither tier charges per-request fees, which makes billing simpler than major clouds where GET and POST operations add up quickly. You only pay for the bandwidth delivered out of the edge.

You can switch between tiers or restrict regions on existing zones. In the bunny.net dashboard, go to CDN, select your Pull Zone, click Pricing & Routing, choose your tier or toggle specific geographic regions on or off, and click Confirm. Disabling higher-cost regions like the Middle East & Africa ($0.06/GB) or South America ($0.045/GB) prevents users in those locations from consuming bandwidth at higher rates.

New signups get a 14-day free trial. Bunny gives you $20 in trial credits without entering a card, or $50 in credits if you attach a card during signup. Adding billing information does not trigger automated payments on its own; bunny.net only bills your card automatically if you explicitly turn on Automatic Recharge. If you deposit funds by mistake, keep in mind that payments are generally non-refundable, though bunny.net does make exceptions for mistaken deposits or balances left unused within one month of account creation.

How to set a monthly bandwidth cap on a Pull Zone

Because a zero balance does not immediately cut off traffic, setting an explicit bandwidth limit on your pull zone is the only native way to stop a traffic surge from running up your bill.

Here is how to set a hard bandwidth limit:

1. Log into the dashboard and go to CDN.
2. Click on the Pull Zone you want to protect.
3. Open the Limits tab from the left menu.
4. Locate the Monthly bandwidth limit input.
5. Enter your maximum allowed monthly transfer in gigabytes (for example, entering 500 caps the zone at 500 GB for the month).
6. Save your changes.

By default, this setting is 0, which means unlimited. Once you set a numeric value, bunny.net tracks the zone's monthly traffic. If the limit is reached, the zone will be disabled until the next billing cycle. That means your zone stops serving requests and drops offline, but it stops further bandwidth costs dead in their tracks.

Rate limiting and connection caps

Alongside the monthly bandwidth cap, bunny.net provides edge rate-limiting controls under the same Limits tab. These settings help throttle aggressive clients, scrapers, or hotlinking before they consume your monthly allowance.

• Download speed limits: Caps the maximum transfer speed per network connection in kB/s. Leaving this at 0 keeps it unlimited.
• Limit after: Sets the number of kilobytes transferred in a single request before the download speed limit takes effect. If set to 0, rate limiting applies immediately to the entire download. This is useful for media files where you want initial buffering to be fast, but want long downloads throttled.
• Requests limits: Sets the maximum number of requests allowed per second from a single IP address. A value of 0 means unlimited.
• Burst requests: Configures how many requests per second an IP can make before the requests limit is enforced. Setting this to 0 disables bursting.
• Maximum connections per IP: Restricts the number of concurrent connections allowed to the zone from a single IP on a per-server basis. Setting it to 0 leaves it unlimited.

Tuning these options prevents a single misconfigured crawler or hostile bot from consuming all your monthly bandwidth in a couple of hours.

Configuring Auto-Recharge safely

If you want your CDN zones to run without manual top-ups, you can configure Auto-Recharge under the Billing page.

Auto-Recharge triggers when your balance drops to 20% of your chosen recharge amount. For example, if you pick a $50 recharge amount, the system charges your payment method when your account balance reaches $10. If an unexpected spike drops your balance below zero before the charge processes, the payment automatically covers your recharge amount plus whatever negative balance you accumulated, bringing your balance back up to your configured target.

You can select preset recharge amounts of $10, $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, $1000, $2000, or enter a custom amount. The billing system supports Mastercard, Visa, American Express, and PayPal.

To keep payment processors from locking your card during rapid failures, Auto-Recharge only triggers once every six hours, and it will retry a failing card up to 5 times before stopping. If you want a hard financial ceiling, leave Auto-Recharge turned off entirely, set a monthly bandwidth limit on your pull zones, and top up your account manually as needed.

Monitoring bunny.net balance with Costbrake

Native pull-zone limits are useful for hard cutoffs, but they operate per zone and do not notify you when account-wide spending picks up pace. Costbrake watches your balances and infrastructure spending across platforms like bunny.net, AWS, Cloudflare, and Azure from a single interface.

For bunny.net, Costbrake connects using your account API key to read your current account balance and month-to-date charges. Because bunny.net uses a single account API key with full administrative access rather than fine-grained read-only tokens, Costbrake stores the credential using AES-256-GCM encryption.

Costbrake runs checks hourly on the Free plan ($0 for 2 provider connections, 1 seat, and 30 days of history) and every 5 minutes on the Pro plan ($12/month or $120/year for 10 connections and 3 seats). You can set:

• Spike alerts: Triggers when an hour costs at least $5 more than normal and exceeds 3x your 7-day hourly baseline.
• Budget alerts: Alerts sent at 50%, 80%, and 100% of your configured budget targets.
• Forecast alerts: Flags when your current month-to-date spend plus the burn rate over the last 72 hours is set to pass your monthly budget.
• New-charge alerts: Notifies you whenever a new billable service appears on your account above $1.

Alerts go to email on all plans, with Slack, Discord, and signed webhooks available on Pro, and PagerDuty supported on Team ($39/month). While Costbrake includes reversible, opt-in brakes for several platforms, brakes are not available for bunny.net yet, so setting the native monthly bandwidth limit inside your bunny.net dashboard remains your primary hard stop. Every new workspace begins with a 14-day Pro trial with no credit card required. To connect your account, hand the instructions to your coding agent via agent setup or link it through the dashboard.