On Monday, the Slovenian content-delivery company bunny.net published a blog post with the title “We’re making Bunny DNS free.” The Hacker News crowd celebrated. Free infrastructure, the thinking goes, is unambiguously good — another brick removed from the walled garden, another tool liberated for indie developers and small businesses. The post’s framing — “a faster internet won’t build itself” — landed exactly as intended.

But read the announcement again, and a different story emerges. This was not a product launch dressed up as altruism. It was a product burial — and the obituary tells us more about the state of the CDN market than the company’s marketing team would like.

Cloudflare Won This Fight a Decade Ago

Bunny.net is not a charity. The company raised $5.88 million in Series A funding in 2022 and, according to independent estimates from Latka, generated roughly $8.6 million in annual recurring revenue with a staff of 78. You do not take a core infrastructure product to zero at that scale unless continuing to charge for it is worse than giving it away.

The reason it is worse has a name. Cloudflare launched its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in 2018 — a free, privacy-forward service that doubled as a distribution channel for everything Cloudflare actually sells. It was not subtle. DNS would be the lobby, lit warmly and staffed without a cash register. The paid floors — DDoS mitigation, Workers, storage, video — sat upstairs. The lobby gets you in the door. Upstairs is where the margins live.

Bunny DNS going free in mid-2026 is not a competitive move. It is an eight-year-late acknowledgment that the standalone DNS business has been dead since the moment 1.1.1.1 went live.

The Routing Layer Is Not the Prize Anymore

What made DNS valuable in the 2000s and early 2010s was its role as the internet’s switchboard. Control the switchboard, and you could charge for precision — geo-routing, failover, load balancing, latency optimization. But precision routing is now table stakes. AWS Route 53 offers it. Azure offers it. Cloudflare offers it for free. The marginal cost of resolving an additional DNS query has rounded to zero.

One network engineer at a midwestern ISP, blowing off steam in a Slack channel while monitoring a BGP flap, described it with surprising economy: “DNS is the host stand. You do not charge people to walk up to the host stand. You charge for the food. Bunny just realized they were the only restaurant on the block with a cover charge they couldn’t justify.”

The mix of irritation and relief in that observation captures the moment. Everyone in infrastructure knows DNS has been a loss leader for years. Bunny.net was simply the last firm to stop pretending otherwise.

Ljubljana vs. San Francisco

There is a structural problem here that a cheerful blog post cannot paper over. Bunny.net is headquartered in Ljubljana, Slovenia. To compete with Cloudflare — a publicly traded company with a market capitalization north of $30 billion — it must match a free tier that Cloudflare can subsidize indefinitely from enterprise contracts, investor patience, and sheer scale.

The math does not favor the European upstart. Cloudflare can treat DNS as a rounding error in its customer-acquisition budget. Bunny.net, operating on single-digit millions in revenue, cannot. Going free is not a move of strength. It is the recognition that the platform giants have made charging for the basics an untenable position — not because they are better engineers, but because they are bigger balance sheets.

This is the market discipline that free-tier economics produces. Efficient, technically sound European competitors do not lose on quality. They lose because American platforms can afford to give away the entry-level product forever, starving anyone who needs that revenue to fund growth. It is consumer welfare in the short term and platform consolidation in the long term — a trade the tech industry has learned to call innovation.

What Bunny Is Actually Selling

None of this means bunny.net is doomed. The company has a genuinely capable video delivery stack, a strong reputation among WordPress users, and a CDN product that competes credibly on performance. Its DNS was never the product anyone was buying; it was the on-ramp. Making the on-ramp toll-free is a rational concession to market reality.

The question is whether bunny.net can now convert the traffic into revenue at the layers above — video optimization, edge scripting, storage — before the same dynamics that flattened DNS pricing arrive there too. The history of infrastructure suggests the answer is a matter of time, not strategy. Free tiers spread upward. Margins compress. The lobby gets larger while the paid floors move higher, until only the very largest players can reach them.

Bunny.net made the right call. That does not make the call encouraging. A healthier market would have room for a company to charge a modest amount for a high-quality routing product and thrive on the basis of performance alone. Instead, the market gave it two choices: make it free, or watch your users walk to a platform that will.

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