Cloud Firewall Pricing - Explore the Pricing Models

As organizations accelerate their shift to the cloud, securing dynamic workloads with cloud firewalls has become a top priority.

But while deploying a cloud firewall is relatively straightforward, deciphering its pricing is anything but. With a mix of usage-based billing, layered services, and vendor-specific models, many businesses are left puzzled or overpaying for security they don’t fully understand. Explore the fundamentals of cloud firewall pricing so IT and security leaders can make smarter, more cost-effective decisions without compromising protection.

Cloud Securiy Pricing Request

The Challenges of Cloud Firewall Pricing

Cloud firewall pricing isn’t predictable like buying a physical appliance unless you are under a traditional enterprise software license. Most cyber security vendors and cloud marketplaces offer metered, subscription, or hybrid pricing models, and each with its own trade-offs.

Some of the key challenges include:

Variability of firewall pricing across cloud vendors: Each cloud vendor, like AWS, Azure, and GCP charge differently for their firewalls and also charge 3rd party firewall vendors, like Check Point, different prices for compute and storage services consumed by the firewall

Dynamic usage patterns: Consumption-based firewall costs rise unexpectedly when cloud traffic surges, especially during peak periods or application scaling events like seasonal retail fluctuations or financial market volatility.

Complex feature tiers: Make it extremely challenging to understand value received since basic firewalling services are often overpriced, appearing high in value. Given the continued rise of AI-driven cyber threats basic firewall and routing services are not enough. What is mandatory today are advanced network security features like intrusion prevention systems, TLS inspection, anti-bot, and threat emulation. These services are often AI-powered with multiple pass throughs of deep packet inspection of network traffic. These critically important prevention capabilities can actually cost less than the lower quality services, so you don’t want to be overpaying for basic cloud firewall services, EVER.

Multi-region deployments: Organizations using cloud firewalls across multiple availability zones or regions may need to deploy multiple gateways—multiplying costs.

Understanding these nuances and how they impact the unique cloud vendor pricing models is essential to avoid sticker shock when the monthly cloud bill arrives.

Common Cloud Firewall Pricing Models

Cloud firewall pricing generally falls into one or more of these models:

Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG or PAYGO)

Cloud firewalls charged hourly or per minute, based on usage. Ideal for smaller or short-term projects, testing, or variable workloads.

Pros: No commitment, aligns with elastic demand

Cons: Costs can balloon without usage limits or monitoring

Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

Organizations purchase licenses directly from the cloud firewall vendor and deploy them in the cloud.

Pros: Predictable costs, often cheaper long-term.

Cons: Less flexible for changing capacity needs.

Enterprise Agreements

Custom contracts with fixed annual or multi-year pricing for large cloud firewall deployments.

Pros: Discounts are common at scale, centralized billing.
Cons: Requires accurate upfront planning and commitment.

Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) –

Managed services are growing in popularity for complex cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity deployments.

FWaaS can be self-managed or delivered as a fully managed service. A fully managed FWaaS is ideal for those seeking higher-quality network security operations than they can provide themselves.
Usually, you pay a fixed monthly amount and receive a given Quality of Service (QoS) per the contract or Terms of Service (ToS).

Estimating Monthly Network Traffic for Inspection – From TB / Month to Gbps

A major component of cloud firewall pricing is the amount of network traffic being inspected and passing through the firewall, especially in PAYGO models. The network traffic impacts both compute and storage monthly expenses charged by the cloud vendors. To get a good estimate or even understand current billing, you need to understand how to calculate network traffic volumes. Cloud firewall pricing is usually by the Gigabyte or Terabyte per second, so you need to estimate how much total packets are being inspected each month, usually in Terabytes and calculate the monthly estimate. One straightforward way to do this is to use your network logs to estimate your average total monthly network traffic in Bytes required. A good estimate of your cloud network consumption requirements can be based on your network bandwidth. Here are examples of small, medium, and large network traffic environments, converting from bytes to bits along the way from a free online bytes to bits converter:

Large: ~1 Gbps of continuous traffic ≈ ~324 TB/month of packets inspected

Medium: ~300 Mbps of continuous traffic = ~100 TB/month of packets inspected

Small: ~100Mbps of continuous traffic = ~32 TB/month of packets inspected

To estimate your consumption-based monthly firewall costs:

Review historical bandwidth usage from your cloud provider or your on-premises network logs identifying peak hours and sustained averages.

Factor in scaling (auto-scaling groups, Kubernetes nodes, etc.) and apply a 20–30% buffer for growth or spikes

Cloud vendors usually charge by the second so we need to convert your estimate of monthly throughput needed from TB per hour to GBps. Then we multiply by the vendor per second firewall price, then by 60 to get an hourly cost then by 730 (assuming 730 hours per month) to get your monthly firewall monthly cost estimate. Remember to include the monthly cloud vendor storage and compute costs for the cloud firewall to function as well.

So, for a medium sized organization with 100TB monthly network traffic the cost calculation for a leading cloud vendor firewall might look something like this:

100TB/month = .30846 Gbps (from free online converter)

Cloud firewall pricing = $1.75per hour * 730 hours /month = $1,277.50 per month

Compute/processing = $.016 per GB * 100,000 GB (100TB) = $1,600 per month

Management and other costs = $350 per month

Total cost for 100TB/month network traffic = $1,277.50 + $1600 + $350 = $3,227.50 per month or $38,750 per year

Below is a graph of estimated total monthly list costs for Check Point vs a major cloud security vendor for small, medium, and large network traffic environments based on March 2025 list prices. Your actual cost may vary due to discounting, buying volume, or other unique reasons. The bar chart depicts the Check Point cloud firewalls are competitively priced even while outperforming other cloud firewall vendors 100% effective to 0% in independent testing.

check point cloud firewall vs competitors

What Affects Network Traffic Volume / Monthly Costs?

North-South traffic: Internet or inter-cloud traffic. Inspecting more traffic types leads to higher cost due to increased bandwidth requirements and inspection complexity.

East-West traffic: Internal traffic between services, zones, or VPCs. East-west traffic can be surprisingly large in microservice-heavy application architectures or larger companies.

Encrypted traffic: Requires more compute resources for inspection, potentially leading to higher monthly costs.

How to Estimate Costs

Once you’ve estimated your traffic and deployment size, plug those numbers into a firewall pricing calculator on the marketplace of your choice like the AWS pricing calculator or Check Point TCO calculator. Consider these key inputs:

Number of gateways or nodes

Region(s) deployed

Expected average throughput (in Gbps or TB/month)

Add-ons: threat intelligence, IPS, URL filtering, logging

Extra Often Forgotten Virtual Firewall Costs:

Cloud provider charges for data transfer (especially between zones)

Cloud storage for logs and events

Additional virtual machines required for high availability

Tips for Optimizing Cloud Firewall Spend

To control and reduce firewall costs without compromising network security, consider the following strategies:

Use Auto-Scaling cautiously: Set and manage the thresholds over time for firewall instance scaling to ensure you are not constantly over-provisioning

Enable logging selectively: Only log when necessary to reduce cloud storage costs

Offload encrypted traffic: If you don’t need deep packet inspection on all TLS traffic, disable decryption where appropriate

Consolidate security capabilities: Use unified threat management (UTM) bundles rather than piecemeal cyber security services

Right-Size your instances: Choose the correct VM sizes, cores, or throughput tiers based on actual usage, not maximum theoretical capacity

Mastering Cloud Firewall Costs with CloudGuard

Cloud firewalls are essential for modern cloud security—but pricing them can be a challenging. Between variable traffic volumes, regional deployments, and layered services, it’s easy to lose track of the different options and associated costs.

By understanding the core pricing models, accurately estimating your traffic, and applying smart cost-control practices, you can secure your cloud workloads without breaking the budget. Fill out this form to receive a detailed, price quote based on your unique network traffic needs and check out this video of cloud firewall effectiveness test results by independent, non-profit, CyberRatings.org.