Akamai Cloud pricing and billing describes how Akamai charges for the cloud computing platform it acquired as Linode and now sells as Akamai Cloud. The platform is infrastructure as a service: virtual machines (Linodes), managed Kubernetes, storage, databases and networking. It is not licensed per user or per installation. Self-service accounts accept the Akamai Cloud Master Services Agreement, which grants a limited, time-bound, revocable, non-exclusive and non-transferable licence to use the Services for the customer’s business purposes.[4] Contracted customers buy Akamai Cloud under the Akamai Terms & Conditions, whose Service Terms of Use have a dedicated section on Akamai Cloud Computing Services.[5] In both cases billing follows the same hybrid hourly model.[1][6]
Editions
Akamai publishes prices by region. Its pricing index groups North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America under global pricing and lists Jakarta under local pricing tailored to that market.[8] The Service Descriptions list the compute plan families: Shared CPU, Dedicated CPU, High Memory, Premium CPU and GPU.[7] Selected North American list prices:[3]
| Plan or service | Catalog row | List price (USD) | Included transfer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nanode 1 GB (Shared CPU, 1 CPU, 25 GB) | Nanode 1 GB | 5.00 per month or 0.0075 per hour | 1 TB |
| Linode 4 GB (Shared CPU, 2 CPUs, 80 GB) | Linode 4 GB | 24.00 per month or 0.0360 per hour | 4 TB |
| G8 Dedicated 4x2 (4 GB, 2 vCPUs) | G8 Dedicated 4x2 | 0.07 per hour | 0 TB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell x1 (1 GPU, 16 vCPUs) | RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell x1 | 3.00 per hour | 0 TB |
| LKE high-availability control plane | LKE HA control plane | 60 per cluster per month | n/a |
| LKE-Enterprise (HA and dedicated control plane) | LKE-Enterprise | 300 per cluster per month | n/a |
| Object Storage | Object Storage | 0.02 per GB per month | Adds 1 TB to the pool |
| Block Storage | Block Storage 10 GB | 1.00 per month per 10 GB | n/a |
| Basic NodeBalancer | Basic NodeBalancer | 10 per month or 0.015 per hour | None |
| Managed Services | Managed Services | 100 per compute instance per month | n/a |
Standard LKE pricing covers only the resources consumed (compute instances, NodeBalancers and volumes); the control plane is included unless the customer upgrades to HA or LKE-Enterprise.[3][7] Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL and Valkey clusters are priced per plan and number of nodes.[3] Cloud Firewall, DDoS Protection and VLANs are offered at no additional charge.[7]
Metrics
| Unit | Catalog row | How Akamai describes it |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly rate and monthly cap | Instance hour | Charges accrue at the hourly rate up to the monthly cap; usage is rounded up to the nearest hour.[1] |
| Network transfer | Network transfer | Outbound transfer above the account’s pooled allowance, billed per GB by service region.[2] |
| GB stored | Object Storage and Block Storage SKUs | Monthly price per GB or per volume size.[3] |
Object Storage, Block Storage and compute network transfer use binary units, so 1 GB means 230 bytes and 1 TB means 1024 GB.[1]
Counting / floors
Hourly with a cap. Most paid services have a monthly rate (the cap) and an hourly rate. Charges accrue hourly, rounded up, until the cap is reached, and the account is never billed more than the monthly rate for those services, excluding network transfer overage.[1] Catalog: Akamai Cloud bills hourly, rounded up, up to a monthly cap. Akamai’s worked example: a 1 GB VM created and deleted after 24 hours costs US$0.18 (24 hours at US$0.0075).[3]
Uncapped services. From 2026-07-01, G8 dedicated Linodes, GPU Linodes and additional IPv4 addresses are billed for actual hours used, with no monthly cap. A 30-day month is 720 hours times the hourly rate; daylight saving changes make November 721 hours and March 743 hours.[1] Budgets built on the old monthly caps need adjusting for these plans.
Present means billable. Charges accrue for any service on the account, even when powered off or idle, because data and resources stay reserved. The only way to stop billing is to remove the service.[1][3] Catalog: Powered-off and resized Akamai Cloud services keep accruing charges.
Resizes. A resize creates a new billable service with its own line item. Resizing and then returning to the original plan in one cycle produces three billable services, whose combined hourly charges can exceed the original monthly cap.[1]
Invoices. An invoice is generated on the first day of each month for the previous month. A mid-month invoice is issued if the account reaches a billing threshold, initially about US$50 for many users and raised over time with a history of on-time payment.[1] Under the MSA, fees are due within three days of invoicing, are non-cancelable and non-refundable apart from SLA credits, and may change on 30 days’ notice.[4] Catalog: Akamai Cloud self-service fees may change on 30 days' notice.
Network transfer. Inbound transfer is free, as is private traffic over VLANs, within a VPC, and same-data-center traffic over IPv6 or private IPv4. Outbound transfer to other data centers or the internet, and all outbound Object Storage transfer, is metered.[2] Allowances are prorated by the hours a service is active and added to a global pool, or to a region-specific pool in some newer data centers; overage is charged at the end of the billing period.[2] Catalog: Akamai Cloud transfer is pooled and only outbound overage is billed. In North America the overage price is US$0.005 per GB.[3] Older plans include 0 TB to 20 TB per month, but G8 and GPU plans include no bundled transfer.[3] Catalog: G8 and GPU plans include no bundled transfer. Email alerts are sent at 80%, 90% and 100% of the pool.[2]
Data center pricing. Plans are generally billed at the same rate everywhere, but some newer data centers bill services and transfer at separate rates.[1]
Virtualization & partitioning
Every Linode is a virtual machine and is billed as a separate service; Shared CPU instances share cores with other instances, while Dedicated, High Memory and Premium plans use dedicated cores.[7] For third-party software licensed by core or processor, the vCPU and CPU counts published for each plan in the price list are the starting point for counting.[3]
Cloud / BYOL
Akamai Cloud has no licence-mobility program because it sells infrastructure, not software licences. Software that customers bring, including One-Click App Marketplace components, remains under its own terms; Akamai is not party to transactions between the customer and the third-party provider and may prohibit any Third Party Content.[5] The Longview monitoring client is open source.[7] See cloud BYOL.
Programs
- Prepayment and promotional credit. Customers may prepay to build a credit balance, which is applied before the card on file is charged. Promotional credits are used first and expire at the end of their window.[3]
- Refunds. A refund may be requested for a positive balance, excluding promotional credits, for payments made in the last 180 days, less a US$5 processing fee; accounts cancelled within the first 7 days get a full refund.[1]
- Resale. Unless an Order Form permits it, a customer may not resell Akamai Cloud Computing Services.[5] Catalog: Akamai Cloud services may not be resold without an Order Form. The MSA allows resale only where the customer accepts the reseller terms.[4]
- Managed Services. Infrastructure management can be added from an existing account for US$100 per compute instance per month, with no obligation or contract.[3]
Out of scope
- Prices outside North America, which are published on separate regional pages.
- Distributed compute regions, which have no network transfer pooling.
- Negotiated commitments for contracted Akamai Cloud customers.
- Third-party software licences for operating systems or applications deployed on Linodes.