Cutting a $4,100 CDN bill to $1,600 in one teardown

Cutting a $4,100 CDN bill to $1,600 in one teardown

A podcast host in Austin was paying $4,100/month in egress and assumed it was just "the price of audio." We did a line-item teardown.

— Pulled bandwidth by content type: 71% was audio, 18% was un-compressed JSON API, 11% images
— Enabled Brotli on the JSON — it dropped 18% of bill to 6%
— Found audio served with no Range support, so scrubbing re-downloaded whole files
— Enabled byte-range caching at the edge so seeks fetched only the needed bytes
— Moved to a commit tier once we knew the real steady-state volume

The range fix alone cut audio bandwidth 38% because listeners skip intros constantly. Total bill fell to $1,600. Always teardown by content type and request pattern first — the headline number hides where the money actually goes.

The number that mattered: $2,500/month saved, mostly from one Range header.