We’re making Bunny DNS free

At bunny.net, our mission has always been ambitious but focused: help make the internet hop faster.

To do that, we’ve built a massive global network spanning 119 locations and counting. Today, this network powers over 1.5 million websites and consistently delivers some of the fastest content delivery around the globe. But while deploying thousands of servers globally is an impressive feat on its own, the hardware itself does not explain how bunny.net is able to deliver such an impressive level of performance.

The real secret hides under the hood, embedded in the routing engine that directs every request, every user, and sends traffic exactly where it needs to go. That engine is Bunny DNS.

From internal engine to 200 billion customer queries per month

Originally, Bunny DNS was built with one simple goal: to build the most advanced routing engine possible, capable of analyzing every DNS query and directing it to the optimal destination for serving your content. Even to this day, it’s what makes Bunny CDN achieve it’s exceptional performance.

Four years ago, we took everything we had learned from designing and running this system and turned it into a product our users could use themselves. With Bunny DNS, we’ve upgraded DNS from being a basic record lookup table into a globally distributed, smart routing engine. Instead of just returning static records, it allows developers to use latency data, health checks, and even JavaScript to dynamically determine exactly where requests should go.

We applied our traditional mantra. We made it affordable, scalable, and added a generous free tier. The response was incredible, and today, Bunny DNS powers over 300,000 domains and handles nearly 200 billion queries every single month.

But as we looked closer at our mission, we realized something needed to change.

Dealing with infrastructure costs is already notoriously complex. You shouldn’t have to stress about pricing tiers or whether a sudden spike of a million queries is going to result in an unpredictable bill.

If we truly believe in our mission to help make the internet hop faster, then the fundamental system that sits between your users and your services shouldn’t be a premium add-on. It should be accessible to everyone.

So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.

Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)

As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.

The entry point for everything else

Making Bunny DNS free doesn’t mean we’re losing interest in it. Quite the opposite. More than ever, we view DNS as the core product that glues our entire platform together. It’s the starting line for everything else your application does.

Getting that starting line set up is now easier than ever. If you’re migrating from somewhere else, our new automatic zone scanning checks your domain’s most common record names and types, reconstructing your zone so you only have to make a few tweaks instead of starting from scratch. (You can also just upload a BIND file if you prefer.)

Once your records are in place, the real magic happens. With 1-Click Acceleration, you can enable the CDN directly from your DNS records. We’ll spin up a Pull Zone behind the scenes and instantly start routing requests through our edge network. Once traffic is flowing, 1-Click Security lets you enable Bunny Shield instantly to filter traffic at the edge, blocking common exploits and absorbing DDoS attacks before they ever touch your origin server.

Performance, security, and routing are now unified in one place, rather than stitched together after the fact. Our goal is to keep evolving this with even more advanced record types.

Beyond making it free, we’re also making it better

Saving on costs is great, but ultimately, what drives us at bunny.net is building incredible products. While all of that was happening, we’ve also been making steady changes to DNS itself. There haven’t been many major releases, but rather a lot of smaller improvements over time.

IPv6 is no longer optional

More and more networks default to IPv6 now, especially on mobile. So we made sure everything on our side just works in a dual-stack world.

If you’re using Bunny DNS, your nameserver records already resolve over both IPv4 and IPv6. There’s nothing to configure, nothing to migrate. It just works the way it probably should have a while ago.

We’ve added DNSSEC, without the usual trade-offs

DNSSEC is one of those things people want in theory but hesitate to adopt in practice.

Part of that is the complexity, but part of it is also that traditional DNSSEC can expose information about your zone that you might not want to share.

We implemented DNSSEC with NSEC Black Lies to get around that. You still get the validation and protection against tampering, but without making it easy for someone to walk your entire domain structure.

It’s one of those details most people won’t notice directly, but it does change how comfortable you can be with turning DNSSEC on.

We’ve modernized record types

DNS has moved far beyond simple address records. Modern applications increasingly rely on DNS not just to point a name at an IP address, but to describe how clients should connect, how certificates should be validated, and how security settings should be managed over time.

That’s why we’ve been expanding Bunny DNS with support for more advanced record types.

We’ve added support for HTTPS and SVCB records, which let you hint how clients should connect to your services. TLSA records are there if you’re using DANE and want tighter control over certificate validation. And CDS and CDNSKEY help automate DNSSEC key management so you’re not rotating things by hand.

None of this is particularly flashy, but it’s the kind of stuff you end up needing once you move past a basic setup.

Helping you build faster

We take our mission seriously, and the “help” part of it is perhaps the most important. By dropping usage charges for DNS and integrating it deeply with the rest of our stack, starting with CDN and Shield, we want to help you build faster, safer, and more resilient applications without worrying about arbitrary limits.

In a world where everyone simply wants to ship as many features as fast as possible, we’re focused on something else: making Bunny DNS incredible to use and seamlessly integrated into everything else we do, so you can build faster, sleep easier, and ultimately create build better user experiences for everyone.

If you haven’t tried Bunny DNS in a while, now’s a good time to take another look. You can add your zones, point your domains, and leave it at that, or start layering on CDN and Shield when you need them.

It’s free now, so you can log in or sign up and start using it straight away.