When it comes to cost, the article is wrong. What you do is get a quote from all the CDNs (akamai, fastly, cloudfront) and talk to your AM in the CDN you want about matching the other guy(s).
Our CF cost is .02/GB, no region delta, no request costs, for like a $2k commitment a month.
It depends on what you charge your customers. But with higher commitments come lower costs. We will be dropping our cost down to .007 per GB when we hit a higher tier, but we can't do that commitment quite yet.
That's why a lot of companies will have servers on oldschool hosting providers for large servers or high bandwidth usage. Cloud offerings are too expensive for that currently.
Some specialised CDNs also offer low prices without commitments like Bunny CDN:
It always boils down to where your customer is. If you're targeting a specific geo, it always pays to check what CDN provider has better peering/transit to the majority of the customers. There's also lots of regional players with way better connections compared to global CDN providers.
Price-wise, public prices are just for checking out the provider, one-off engagements or for using it as a secondary/backup-only CDN. Every CDN provider have private pricing and when there's a baseline usage it's always worthy reaching out. A small commitment can really drop the data transfer prices.
Our CF cost is .02/GB, no region delta, no request costs, for like a $2k commitment a month.