bunny.net Review & 2 Alternatives (2026)

bunny.net is a Slovenian CDN that launched in 2015 as BunnyCDN, reportedly bootstrapped from a $200 budget, rebranded in 2021 and took a $6M Series A in October 2022. Today it runs 119 PoPs on its Standard Network plus a 10-PoP Volume Network, and the product line has grown past plain CDN into Stream (video hosting, encoding and player), edge Storage, image Optimizer and DNS. The reason it belongs in this directory rather than the graveyard of 'we found out at scale they ban porn' providers is one sentence in the Acceptable Use Policy: bunny.net accepts its service being used for providers of 'adult content', as long as the content is legal under the laws of Slovenia and the 50 US states. That is the clearest written adult permission you will find from a CDN with mainstream-grade infrastructure, and it is the single biggest reason adult webmasters keep recommending it on forums.

Set your expectations correctly here, because the third-party affiliate directories have not caught up. Several still advertise 20% recurring commission on referred spend; bunny.net's own affiliate page and documentation, as of June 2026, describe a flat $20 one-time reward for every new paying customer who signs up through your link. No recurring cut, no revshare tier, no cap on volume. You can take the balance two ways: convert to Bunny credits anytime with a 25% bonus ($20 becomes $25 of service credit, no minimum), or request a cash payout via PayPal or virtual VISA once you've banked $100, paid out monthly. Two more catches: you must be a paying bunny.net customer yourself to join, and the cookie/attribution window is not published anywhere I could find — not on the affiliate page, not in the docs, not in the FAQ. For a company this transparent about bandwidth pricing, that omission is noticeable.

The affiliate dashboard shows clicks, signups and successful referrals in real time, and bunny.net supplies 150+ marketing creatives plus a Discord community for affiliates. That's the extent of it: no published sub-id parameter, no postback support, no API for conversion data, so you are reconciling against their dashboard with no independent verification. As affiliate tooling goes, that's hobby-tier. The service-side tooling is a different story, and frankly it's the product you're actually evaluating. Bunny Stream gives you free encoding, a free embeddable player, token authentication, hotlink protection, geo-blocking, watermarking, the Media Cage anti-download layer and enterprise multi-DRM on higher tiers — most of the protection stack a paysite or clip store needs without bolting on third parties. TUS resumable uploads and webhooks make the ingest pipeline scriptable, and the CDN itself charges no request fees, only bandwidth. The 250+ Tbps backbone claim is theirs, not mine, but real-world CDNperf rankings have placed them at or near the top for years.

This is where bunny.net over-delivers relative to its price. Trustpilot sits around 4.8/5 across roughly 1,370 reviews, and the dominant theme is support speed — fast first responses, 24/7 coverage, actual engineers answering. On webmaster forums the long-tenure reports are consistent: operators running it four to five years describe it as boring in the good sense. The complaint patterns worth knowing: the promotional trial credit displays in the dashboard in a way some users found misleading once it expired and turned out non-refundable; HTTPS and pull-zone configuration trips up first-timers; there's no full-page caching, so it won't replace a Cloudflare-style HTML cache layer; and a handful of Stream users have reported playback freezing issues. None of these rise to the level of payment disputes, account seizures or retroactive content policy reversals — the failure modes that actually kill adult businesses on infrastructure providers. Eleven years in, there's no such incident on the public record.

If you serve video to an EU or North American audience — tube site, clip store, paysite, AI-generation output — bunny.net is close to a default pick: $0.01/GB Standard or $0.005/GB Volume, free encoding, written adult permission, and a $1 monthly minimum that lets you test on pocket change before committing a terabyte. The economics weaken at the edges. The Volume Network's 10 PoPs mean cheap bandwidth comes with longer routes for far-flung users, and Standard Network pricing climbs to $0.03/GB in Asia and $0.06/GB in the Middle East and Africa — if that's your audience, model the blend before assuming the headline rate. Who it is not for: affiliates hunting recurring income. A flat $20 bounty with a $100 PayPal floor and an unpublished cookie window is a nice rebate on traffic you were sending anyway, not a campaign you build media buying around. Sign up for the bandwidth, treat the referral link as loose change.