Bunny makes DNS free, but the fine print says not quite

Bunny turned off the DNS query meter

Bunny.net eliminated DNS query fees outright. Accounts now get free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains, no query limits, no per-request billing, with smart records and health monitoring included rather than walled off in an enterprise tier. The company's pitch: DNS is the entry point that sits in front of CDN and security, so charging unpredictable usage fees on it works against the mission to make the internet "hop faster."

This is not a public resolver like 1.1.1.1. Bunny DNS is authoritative DNS with a routing engine that reads latency data, runs health checks, and uses JavaScript-based logic to steer traffic. It already carries 300,000 domains and processes 200 billion queries a month across 119 network locations, plus recent additions like DNSSEC and HTTPS/SVCB record types.

The thread split over a single line of small print

Longtime customers cheered the move and the speed of the product, but the sharpest reaction zeroed in on the word "free." One user reported the headline doesn't survive account signup.

"I can't open an account and get free DNS from them… Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare." — a user who tried to sign up

The culprit is the standard $1/month minimum spend that applies to every account. Another commenter argued that floor is doing real work.

"This is smart. Ensures you have valid payment information, which implies a financial institution is running KYC on your customer. That reduces fraud and abuse…" — a commenter defending the minimum-spend floor

Meanwhile readers struggled with what the product actually is, a confusion the marketing copy didn't help. One regular pointed people past the blog to the docs to settle it.

"it's content DNS service; with server-side resource record shuffling; and with JavaScript… examples that don't check the question type, just to make it weird." — a commenter who dug into the documentation

And a current user offered the most damning praise a DNS provider can get, noting in the thread that the service has been "mostly unremarkable (which is a very good thing for a DNS provider)."

The live question underneath the cheering is the old Cloudflare playbook: free authoritative DNS gets your records into the dashboard, and once they're there, flipping on the paid CDN and WAF is a button click away.