[HN Gopher] Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?
___________________________________________________________________
Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?
Author : MattSayar
Score : 326 points
Date : 2025-01-15 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mattsayar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mattsayar.com)
| hipadev23 wrote:
| because they're an amazing piece of technology that also happens
| to be a state sponsored man-in-the-middle platform.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| I was assuming that it's a loss-leader sort of business
| strategy at play before reading your comment. Do you care to
| share any insights/references to support this claim?
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Nah that'd be a national security crisis.
|
| But the presence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM well
| over 10 years ago should be sufficient.
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| Gotcha. Yeah, I mean all of these platforms are certainly
| juicy targets for room 641A [0] shenanigans. I just
| wondered if there had been some public leaks or something
| which we might not all be aware of yet.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Post Snowden, I think the assumption has to be any large
| US hosting/service provider is compromised in a similar
| fashion.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| I'd also point out the following from Cloudflare CEO
| Matthew Prince's wiki page [1]:
|
| > "Prince co-founded Unspam Technologies, which supported
| the development of Project Honey Pot [2], an open source
| data collection software created by Prince and Lee
| Holloway designed to gather information on IP addresses
| used by email-address harvesting services."
|
| > In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
| contacted Unspam Technologies, asking, "Do you have any
| idea how valuable the data you have is?" The DHS' email
| served as the impetus for Cloudflare, a technology
| company Prince co-founded with Holloway and fellow
| Harvard Business School graduate Michelle Zatlyn the
| following year
|
| > _The DHS ' email served as the impetus for Cloudflare_
|
| Emphasis mine. I love Cloudflare, their tech is amazing,
| but to bury our heads in the sand that it wasn't started
| from day one to be a government spying program would be
| extremely naive.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Prince
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Honey_Pot
| wumeow wrote:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-prism-secure-
| ciphers/
|
| > At CloudFlare, we have never been approached to
| participate in PRISM or any other similar program.
|
| > To date, CloudFlare has never received an order from
| the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.
| fidotron wrote:
| Overly specific weaseling. (Not by you, by Cloudflare).
|
| The questions are not about if they were approached or
| participate in any programs, it's what they do and if
| they provide the data or not.
| wumeow wrote:
| Again, an offhand comment about an email from the DHS is
| given all the weight in the world while a direct
| statement from Cloudflare is nitpicked to death.
| fidotron wrote:
| The whole point is it's not a direct statement. It is a
| lot of words which fails to answer the core question: is
| cloudflare syphoning data off to any of the Five Eyes
| (and I almost wrote Five Guys . . ) government
| intelligence agencies or their allies?
|
| For example, in your link: "One of the ways we limit the
| scope of orders we receive is by limiting the data we
| store. I have written before about how CloudFlare limits
| what we log and purge most log data within a few hours.
| For example, we cannot disclose the visitors to a
| particular website on CloudFlare because we do not
| currently store that data."
|
| So if they are MITMing everything they totally could just
| send everything out straight away and not contradict what
| they're saying at all. Them storing the data or not is
| completely beside the point.
| ahofmann wrote:
| US based companies (like china and europe based ones) are
| not allowed to talk about it, when state actors
| implementing their spying tools. It is just naive to
| think that cloudflare doesn't give access to state
| agencies. As others have said, it is more likely that
| cloudflare as a company is entirely built around the idea
| to provide a singe point of surveillance to US agencies.
| wumeow wrote:
| Love the double standard here. An offhand comment about
| an email from the DHS is considered strong evidence that
| Cloudflare was "started from day one to be a government
| spying program" while anything Cloudflare could say to
| deny it is brushed off as not strong enough.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| >> At CloudFlare, we have never been approached to
| participate in PRISM or any other similar program
| [...because we approached them]
|
| >> To date, CloudFlare has never received an order from
| the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court
| [...because they never had to ask in the first place]
|
| My paranoia was cemented by the book When Google Met
| Wikileaks. Silicon Valley types do not have to be coerced
| to share data with 3 letter agencies, they have aligned
| incentives to ensure American dominance. Which is fine
| with me, as an American, but I won't pretend there's some
| rivalry where Cloudflare won't comply without a court
| order.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| One half of the NSA's mission is defensive, dedicated to
| improving the security of US systems and infrastructure:
| https://www.nsa.gov/Cybersecurity/
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Nobody remembers the "SSL added and removed here :)"?
|
| https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/cloudflare_ssl_added_and_rem.
| ..
| edelbitter wrote:
| "Our Free plan gives Cloudflare access to unique threat
| intelligence"
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
| fiatjaf wrote:
| Honestly this is the most likely hypothesis, but would be nice
| to have some more evidence.
| jjordan wrote:
| What are some alternatives? Preferably the more open source the
| better.
| Strongbad536 wrote:
| Idk if they're open source, but netlify was the company that
| I thought sort of made this feature free and easy to use.
| Github pages is also a free alternative.
| mhitza wrote:
| Someone was (incidentally?) ddos'ed on Netlify last year
| and was served a 104k bill. The fees were waved in the end,
| but the caveat remains on all these free services that you
| pay by bandwidth.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| That's why I like Bunny, the only such service I could
| find with prepaid pricing. I would rather have service
| shut off than to have to pay $104k for a day or two of
| service.
| Marsymars wrote:
| It's not the same type of platform as Bunny, but
| NearlyFreeSpeech.NET has done cheap, prepaid hosting for
| 20+ years.
| dingnuts wrote:
| what is an "open source" network infrastructure provider?
| ramon156 wrote:
| Cloudflare is mostly open-sourced, alternatives are more
| often than not closed-sourced
| dewey wrote:
| I don't think putting up a few libraries on GitHub and
| writing great post-mortems makes something "Mostly open-
| sourced".
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I believe the implication is that cloudflares usefulness
| is not in her source code but rather her physical infra,
| there is not some free as in freedom alternative to that.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| Alternatives to what? Five Eyes? Good luck with that.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| China is happy to offer an alternative. It has pretty high
| costs, and I don't think it's worth it, but it exists.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is one of those things where the act of trying to evade
| state-level actors by definition puts you on their radar big
| time.
| MarkuC wrote:
| PRISM revealed secrets. It also revealed that some companies
| fought back as much as possible. It's also possible to design
| core tech so that even when forced to participate, you reveal
| as little or no information.
|
| CloudFlare, PRISM, and Securing SSL Ciphers, 2013-06-12 Matthew
| Prince https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-prism-secure-
| ciphers/
| gosub100 wrote:
| So the deep state is smart enough to take over the corporation
| and inject all this secret squirrel tech, but didn't think to
| cook the books to make it look like a marginally-profitable
| (but boring) business?
|
| It reminds me of the counterargument to UFOs where they say "so
| the UFO flew here from 100 light-years away, through extreme
| cold, deep space, intense radiation, dodged space rocks, but as
| soon as it came into a lukewarm atmosphere with a modest
| gravity and tame weather, it crashed into a field in New
| Mexico?"
| zimpenfish wrote:
| To be fair, you could see how a vehicle designed rigidly for
| extreme cold, extreme vacuum, zero gravity, etc. might fail
| catastrophically when introduced to modest temperatures, a
| modest atmosphere, and a modest gravity.[1]
|
| It wouldn't say much for the foresight of the alien
| designers, mind.
|
| [1] "100 KILOpascals? KILO? I thought you said milli, you
| blithering nixflorp!"
| throwaway92853 wrote:
| > [1] "100 KILOpascals? KILO? I thought you said milli, you
| blithering nixflorp!"
|
| The numbers were given in Universal Standard Units, but the
| manufacturer assumed Galactic Imperial Units
| hipadev23 wrote:
| What? What does business profitability or viability have to
| do with anything? Cloudflare can serve both customers at the
| same time. They still make amazing products, have incredibly
| talented engineers, and provide extremely valuable commercial
| services.
|
| PRISM worked with numerous participants from well-oiled tech
| startups to aging why-wont-you-just-die companies.
| edm0nd wrote:
| They have the nickname "Crimeflare" for a reason and there is a
| reason so many threat actors, phishers, and malware people use
| CF on their landing pages and c2s.
|
| When you file an abuse ticket with CF, CF takes the route of
| "oh we are only routing the data and content, not hosting it"
| and will refuse to terminate the CF accounts of someone being
| malicious. Threat actors know this which is why so many use em.
| gruez wrote:
| >When you file an abuse ticket with CF, CF takes the route of
| "oh we are only routing the data and content, not hosting it"
| and will refuse to terminate the CF accounts of someone being
| malicious. Threat actors know this which is why so many use
| em.
|
| Their abuse page says they forward abuse tickets to the
| origin hosting provider. The origin hosting provider could
| ignore your tickets, but I don't see how that's any different
| than if they didn't use cloudflare to begin with.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Ok but why can't they take responsibility for the abuse and
| terminate the accounts themselves, forcing the malicious
| actors back to being in a position of not being protected
| by cloudflare?
| michaelt wrote:
| Before CF, there were no DDOS for hire services, because
| they all DDOSed each other offline.
|
| Keeping them online generates more DDOSes, driving demand
| for CF's DDOS protection product. Protecting such sites
| is a sound business strategy.
| edm0nd wrote:
| They still have the ability to terminate the accounts of
| the threat actors using their platform (which would fuck up
| their scam/spam/malicious campaigns) yet seem to not want
| to under their guise of "oh its not us".
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| They didn't hesitate with 8chan, even when it was known that
| fedposting was a thing here and that the straw that broke the
| camel's back they pointed to could have well been a false
| flag.
| shubhamjain wrote:
| > Additionally, there's plenty of "Upgrade to Pro" buttons
| sprinkled about. It's the freemium model at work.
|
| I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and
| there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in
| enterprise contracts. Note that, Matthew Prince, the CEO, had
| outlined a few reasons why they have such a generous free tier on
| an Stack Exchange answer[1]. I think the biggest reason is this:
|
| > Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics
| around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable
| margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from
| paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early
| on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue
| to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers
| helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally,
| continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
|
| Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at an
| incredible scale. I would actually be very interested in
| understanding how this vision came to be. Hope Matthew writes
| that book someday.
|
| [1]: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I went back and reread that reply by Matthew. Essentially,
| nothing has changed; the free customers are very important to
| us for all the reasons that he outlined. See also this blog
| post on us and free customers from 2024:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
| bobnamob wrote:
| ^ CTO of Cloudflare for reference
| mdasen wrote:
| I think there are a few other benefits (even if that was the
| main benefit/driving force behind the decision).
|
| When you have low-paying (or zero-paying) customers, you need
| to make your system easy. When you're enterprise-only, you can
| pay for stuff like dedicated support reps. A company is paying
| you $1M+/year and you hire someone at $75,000 who is dedicated
| to a few clients. Anything that's confusing is just "Oh, put in
| a chat to Joe." It isn't the typical support experience: it's
| someone that knows you and your usage of the system. By
| contrast, Cloudflare had to make sure that its system was easy
| enough to use that free customers would be able to easily
| (cheaply) make sense of it. Even if you're going to give
| enterprise customers white-glove service, it's always nice for
| them when systems are easy and pleasant to use.
|
| When you're carrying so much free traffic, you have to be
| efficient. It pushes you to actually make systems that can
| handle scale and diverse situations without just throwing money
| at the problem. It's easy for companies to get bloated/lazy
| when they're fat off enterprise contracts - and that isn't a
| good recipe for long-term success.
|
| Finally, it's a good way to get mindshare. I used Cloudflare
| for years just proxying my personal blog that got very little
| traffic. When my employer was thinking about switching CDNs,
| myself and others who had used Cloudflare personally kinda
| pushed the "we should really be looking at Cloudflare." Free
| customers may never give you a dollar - but they might know
| someone or work for someone who will give you millions.
| Software engineers love things that they can use for free and
| that has often paid dividends for companies behind those free
| things.
| ljm wrote:
| I feel like there might be an additional motivation too,
| which is that this investment in a better internet (free SSL
| for everyone before LetsEncrypt came around, generous free
| tiers for users, etc. etc.) means that Cloudflare builds a
| reputation of being a steward of the ecosystem while also
| benefitting indirectly from wider adoption of good, secure
| practices.
|
| In some ways it's analogous to investing in your local
| community and arguably paying tax: it's rare that you would
| directly and personally benefit from this, but if the
| environment you live in improves from it, crime is reduced,
| more to do, etc. then you can enjoy a better quality of life.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Have they made a better internet? Many would say that made
| it worse.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I don't know the history here, do you have some examples?
|
| My usage is pretty much limited to their DNS.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| They've got a pretty long history of helping scammers and
| criminals.
|
| https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/service-
| providers/too-...
| bentcorner wrote:
| Reminds me of the School -> Pro pipeline where companies sell
| cheaply or even give away their software to learning
| institutions so that students who go pro are familiar with
| their tools and then later recommend it for their work.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| That's absolutely true for things like MS Office and Adobe
| - but it also works in the other direction: I'm sure making
| kids use Java for AP computer-science or for undergrad
| contributed to its uncool status today.
| ninjha wrote:
| The two almost-contradictory takes I hold about this
| are...
|
| - Java is cool, actually
|
| - Java would be just as uncool even if people weren't
| required to use it in school
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem for Java's "uncool status" isn't Java as a
| programming language, the JVM or its academic use IMHO,
| it rather is a consequence of large-enterprise culture.
|
| Large enterprise doesn't value "creativity" or any
| deviation from standards, but it does value plans and
| estimates - hence clueless, _brainless_ "managers" and
| "architects" forced programmers to do absolutely insane
| bullshit busywork that a gang of monkeys on LSD could do,
| and that culture spread throughout the large-enterprise
| world.
|
| On top of that come "design by committee" stuff like
| CORBA, XML, SOAP, Java EE, Enterprise Beans and
| everything associated with this particular horror show,
| JDBC...
|
| You can do absolutely mind blowing stuff with Java and
| the JVM. But fuck corporate for torturing Java and the
| poor sods tasked with the busywork. Java got the image it
| has because programmers want to be creative but could not
| be so because their bosses were braindead.
| fheisler wrote:
| This is exactly our thinking with authentik (open source
| IdP), and it's played out in practice so far. Enterprise
| sales conversations are so much easier when they start with
| "we all use you in our homelabs already." We're much more
| focused on giving those individual users a positive early
| experience (in hopes that some small percentage will really
| pay off down the road) than in extracting a few dollars from
| each of them.
| nindalf wrote:
| I built my website on Cloudflare Pages and ended up using
| basically their entire suite of tools - Pages, D1, Analytics,
| Rules, Functions. The DX was pretty good because all of these
| features worked well together.
|
| Cloudflare offered all of this for free because it gets them
| positive mentions (like the one you're reading right now) and
| they're educating a bunch of developers on their entire
| product portfolio. And what does it cost to host my blog that
| 1000-2000 views a month? Literally nothing.
| ndiddy wrote:
| > I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here
| and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in
| enterprise contracts.
|
| Cloudflare's enterprise customer acquisition strategy seems to
| be offering free or extremely cheap flat-rate plans with "no
| limits", then when a customer gets a sizeable amount of traffic
| they will try to sell them an enterprise plan and cut them off
| if they don't buy (see
| https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-
| web...). IMO this is pretty shrewd, as it means that companies
| can't do real price comparisons between Cloudflare and other
| CDNs until they already have all their infrastructure plugged
| into Cloudflare.
| pc86 wrote:
| I haven't heard about this in particular but based entirely
| on your depiction here it sounds more like fraud to me.
|
| If I was paying a flat rate for a no limit plan, that company
| tried to sell me an Enterprise plan which I declined, then
| they cut me off, we'd be in court as soon as the clerk would
| schedule it.
| jamespo wrote:
| If you were rotating IPs against the TOS I don't think
| you'd have a leg to stand on
| pc86 wrote:
| The GP doesn't mention anything about rotating IPs
| vasco wrote:
| Yep, and if you contact their sales directly because you've
| been bitten before and tell them your traffic they will be
| happy to tell you that yes, other than a short trial you have
| to pay them for huge bandwidth from month one. It's actually
| surprising to me people would believe it's fully free. Like
| think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just
| move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt
| immediately.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| _Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix
| would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare
| would go bankrupt immediately._
|
| Cloudflare's free tier specifically excludes video. See
| https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-
| applicatio...:
|
| _Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)
| Cloudflare's content delivery network (the "CDN") Service
| can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites.
| Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers
| specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform,
| Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve
| video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare
| reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or
| use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users' access to
| certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or
| are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services
| to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of
| pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use
| reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such
| action._
| jsheard wrote:
| Replace Netflix with Reddit in that hypothetical then,
| would they be allowed to serve their substantial non-
| video traffic through the free tier? If so, you have to
| wonder why they choose to pay for Fastly instead.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Does this apply to caching R2 with the free tier CDN?
|
| The R2 overview page explicitly lists "Storage for
| podcast episodes", but a podcast host under the free tier
| would serve a disproportionate percentage of audio files.
| Ambroos wrote:
| Audio is tiny compared to video (and even images),
| especially for podcasts, think ~1MB/minute. And they
| compress well if you want them to be smaller. High
| quality video (think 4K HDR) can quite comfortably be
| over 1MB per second.
|
| I assume they don't want to become a file sharing
| website, but hosting a podcast is relatively easy on the
| bandwidth requirements.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A music album which gives an hour of entertainment might
| be distributed in lossless form at a size of 300 MB or
| so. A similar length TV episode could be between that and
| 1 GB. Podcasts are usually way lower quality and much
| smaller.
|
| A lot of people who had large image collections (like
| myself) online struggled with revenue relative to cost
| circa 2012, I saw a lot of sites I respected go down,
| though we did see some new style social sites such as
| Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Somehow YouTube was
| doing much better in terms of revenue/cost with video.
|
| Compressing images for the web is not at all trivial, I
| over-compressed a few million images and really regretted
| it. When I post to social now I use Photoshop's "(Legacy)
| Save for web" which has a nice slider for the quality
| level and find I can get images I take with my Sony to
| look like they came from a pro camera between 80kb (small
| flower, blurry background) to 800kb. I see huge splash
| images on blogs that are smaller, they make a good first
| impression, look close and the blocking is awful.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| It's been asked and answered many times.
| https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/service-specific-terms-
| deve...
| vasco wrote:
| Well bad example, but as someone else said, replace with
| any other large non video service. I'm not making this
| up, I had calls with sales. And like I said, I don't
| think this is surprising, it's like "infinite bandwidth"
| deals from ISPs and phone data plans, etc. It's a
| reasonable expectation that you'd have to pay at some
| threshold.
| benatkin wrote:
| Frankly it's none of y'alls beeswax what medium of
| content I'm deploying. I can understand restrictions on
| illegal and offensive content. I won't be using
| Cloudflare if including a file or even putting some
| base64 in my html file will be a ToS violation.
|
| It's these petty restrictions that make these pricing
| policies convenient, and it hurts the market :(
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
| https://pricecontrol.biz/en/dumping-from-a-to-z/
| JonoBB wrote:
| What about hosting video on R2 and using the CDN?
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| That particular story / case had a lot more context to it
| that we weren't given. I wouldn't be ready to place any kind
| of merit on it without hearing more. I also think given the
| OP's industry it's likely there were issues with IP
| reputation. Could it have been handled differently? Probably.
| In this case I think it would have been smarter to just part
| ways upfront and let the client know it's not going to work
| out. I suspect the contract was designed to say.. we don't
| see the value in this relationship.. but at this price we'll
| make it work type deal. I don't think that's the right way to
| go, but I hardly believe this is how they operate.
|
| I've used their free -> enterprise services in multiple
| companies and clients. Haven't had a single bad experience
| with them yet. Always helpful, if a bit delayed at times.
| ndiddy wrote:
| It doesn't seem like Cloudflare has any problems with
| online gambling, especially since the first email the
| author got from Cloudflare came from someone in their
| "Gaming & iGaming" division. There's people in this thread
| in other industries who have had similar experiences with
| them.
|
| IMO the biggest problems are how Cloudflare kept inventing
| excuses like "issues with account settings" to get the
| customer on the phone with their sales team, and the mixing
| of "trust and safety" with sales (like deleting their
| account for ToS violations after the CEO mentioned talking
| to a competing CDN).
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I don't know that I can trust the perspective of the Op
| here. Gaming and Gambling aren't the same thing. We don't
| know that they invented excuses here either. I would also
| suspect the comment about a competing CDN was used by the
| OP to try and gain leverage and it failed.
|
| All i'm saying is we can't make a determination of right
| and wrong without more data. All things considered, it
| reads more to me that the data withheld is on the
| original OP side rather than the CF side.
|
| Either way, it's a unique one off. Most of the mentions
| in this thread of this behavior all rely on this one
| experience. I think that in of itself is probably a
| positive on the side of cloudflare. If it were
| institutional that they treat clients like this we would
| hear it regularly.
| jsheard wrote:
| > Gaming and Gambling aren't the same thing.
|
| iGaming is a euphemism for online gambling.
|
| https://assets.ctfassets.net/slt3lc6tev37/4SyI8LW6SeJAGPW
| wZY...
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for the link to the asset too.
| jsheard wrote:
| Gambling is often just refered to as "gaming" by the
| industry and legal system, so the word is like "drinking"
| in that it's both specific and non-specific depending on
| context. English is a very well thought out language.
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| I've always wondered if there is an accounting benefit for
| them. Can the free tier be charged as 'marketing'? No idea how
| you would internally break up the costs, but it could make your
| margins look better.
| crowcroft wrote:
| It's a very elegant business strategy because you have one
| clear focus (handle loads of bandwidth), but it can be
| expressed in so many ways (DNS/Caching, object storage, video
| delivery/streaming, static site hosting).
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics
| around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable
| margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from
| paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early
| on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem.
|
| I'm not really sure how this works.
|
| Suppose you have paying customers and for that you need X
| amount of bandwidth. If you add a bunch of free customers then
| you need X + Y bandwidth. But the price of X + Y is never going
| to be lower than the price of X, is it? So even if the unit
| cost is lower, the total cost is still higher and you haven't
| produced any additional revenue in exchange, so how can this
| produce any net profit?
| chippiewill wrote:
| The point is that that you get your paid offering down to a
| lower price point because you have the volume to get the
| cheaper peering deals. Because your paid offering is cheap
| you get even more volume from paying customers which offsets
| the loss you made.
| mugsie wrote:
| it may be, especially if the ISP in question just does direct
| peering with you, your unit cost can drop to ~ $0/MB, and you
| stop paying Cogent/Verizion/HE unit cost for facilitating the
| connection from you to the ISP.
|
| Works for the ISP too, one off cost for them to drop there
| side of the bill down
| bauruine wrote:
| If you send 10Gbit/s to an ISP you have to pay for transit to
| reach it. But if you send 100Gbit/s+ the ISP suddenly is
| willing to not only peer for free with you but may even host
| the servers for you in their data center for free. [0][1][2]
| So yes being bigger can absolutely save you costs.
|
| [0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/
|
| [1]: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
|
| [2]:
| https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
| Ugohcet wrote:
| The thing with ISPs is the small guys are more likely to have
| to pay, and the smaller you are the more likely you are to
| pay more.
|
| If you are a Tier 1 ISP, everyone is willing to pay you to
| carry their traffic and other Tier 1s just make peering
| agreements with you.
|
| If you're johnscheapvps.com, you're likely to pay all your
| upstream ISPs for your traffic. If you're GCP or, say,
| digitalocean.com, everyone would love to be paying you to get
| faster access to all the sites hosted on your platform (and
| because paying you is probably going to be cheaper than their
| regular upstream)
| benatkin wrote:
| > Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at
| an incredible scale.
|
| This reminds me of the story of how Jeff Bezos bought
| relentless.com. The rest is history.
| https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/
| nickcw wrote:
| I think this is the important part
|
| > Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our
| diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer
| with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of
| bandwidth
|
| If you can peer your traffic you can send it for free.
|
| So lots of small customers, despite not paying anything, is
| helping to reduce bandwidth costs for Cloudflare to zero.
|
| If they've reduced bandwidth costs to zero then they can afford
| to give it away for free.
|
| I can tell you from personal experience that getting some ISPs
| to peer with you is hard unless you are exchanging lots of
| traffic already.
|
| This is a clever playbook that has made Cloudflare a tier 1 ISP
| in an age when that is extremely difficult.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| And this works IME
|
| I use Cloudflare for hobby projects 90% of the time because
| it's free. That dramatically increases the likelihood I
| advocate for their offerings in the enterprise
| jcastro wrote:
| I still cannot believe the pricing on R2, unlimited egress. It's
| absurd, I love it!
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Loss leaders are like that.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Bandwidth has become super cheap nowadays. Even on a CDN if
| you have a large enough commit the prices go very low, so you
| can imagine what the real cost must be:
|
| > In Q1 of this year, I completed my yearly CDN pricing
| survey of over 500 customers and saw the lowest pricing rates
| I have ever seen for the largest customers, as low as
| $0.00038 per GB delivered in the US. Blended pricing globally
| at $0.0006. (Please note, this doesn't mean these are the
| prices you should be asking for or paying!) Lower pricing is
| okay if traffic and commits are growing, but they aren't
|
| https://www.streamingmediablog.com/2024/05/cdn-pricing-
| press...
| pseudosavant wrote:
| And their free tier is 10GB of free storage.
| xd1936 wrote:
| The OP doesn't link to Cloudflare's (repeated) explanation about
| this exact topic.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/
| MattSayar wrote:
| Oh
| parineum wrote:
| I suspect they also greatly benefit from developers using them
| for hobbies and suggesting that their workplace use them in
| turn. Though, that's much harder to track.
| Narciss wrote:
| This ^
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| The reason it's free and with unlimited bandwidth is that it's
| not.
|
| Unless you stay very small, you'll eventually get on the radar of
| the sales team and you'll realize the service is neither
| unlimited nor free. In fact, you'll likely have to look at a 5 or
| 6-figure contract to remain on the service.
| ignoramous wrote:
| (n = 1 & all) A project I co-develop pushed 30TB to 60TB per
| month on Cloudflare Workers in the past (for months on end) for
| $0. No one called us to sign 6 figure contracts.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| wait
| creeble wrote:
| Do you have a counter example, or is this just your
| assumption?
| pc86 wrote:
| There are several counter examples in the comments on
| this page.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| none of which seem to have given their bandwidth figures.
| michaelt wrote:
| Their usage was finite.
|
| So if cloudflare's offer is _really_ unlimited and free,
| they haven't exceeded it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Workers are a very different product so I'm not too surprised
| by that. The main workers payment model is entirely concerned
| with CPU use and you must be minimizing that.
| is_true wrote:
| At which point do you think you get in the radar?
| ensignavenger wrote:
| At the point where the sales team has already hit all the
| targets that are bigger than you.
| spand wrote:
| I can second this. Their sales people have such poor behaviour
| that I am considering moving away simply on principle. There is
| nothing predictable about being on an enterprise contract and
| they will hit you with bullshit overage charges like using too
| many dns requests (wtf??) all of a sudden to force you onto a
| much larger contract. On the 28th of December no less ! We have
| used them for a very long time but I am having very big doubts
| about how much we can use them in the future even though their
| products are great.
| neonsunset wrote:
| https://bunny.net/pricing/ <3
|
| (disclaimer: I'm an employee but no commission is earned for
| this, we just work hard, opinions on HN otherwise don't
| reflect that of my employer)
| wirelesspotat wrote:
| Big +1 for Bunny.net - I moved my current company to Bunny
| and it's been excellent. Super fast (for our PoPs at
| least), reasonable pricing, love the image optimizer & edge
| rules (especially for solving header issues when embedding
| documents), has a Terraform provider, and I was able to set
| most of it up in a day. Was a night and day difference from
| GCP's Cloud CDN
| delduca wrote:
| +1 to Bunny
| pkkkzip wrote:
| - collect telemetry data they can use in their products
|
| - bandwidth is cheap but the bad actor data they gather directly
| helps their paid enterprise tools
|
| - people wouldn't pay for it and move to a competitor that offers
| it free, so its basically a monopoly on a large portion of the
| sales funnel
|
| - branding message as "we are the good guys we are so generous"
| as you can see from the comments has worked in their favor
| simonw wrote:
| I heard a great theory about this recently.
|
| The hardest part of onboarding a new customer to Cloudflare is
| the bit where you need to switch over to having them manage DNS
| for you.
|
| If you're under a DoS attack or similar, waiting for DNS changes
| to propagate is the last thing you want to have to care about!
|
| Cloudflare's generous free tier is an amazing way of getting that
| funnel started: anyone who signs up for the free tier has already
| configured everything that matters, which means when they DO
| consider becoming a paying customer the friction in doing so is
| tiny.
| nichochar wrote:
| We're building our startup infra on cloudflare over the other
| major hyperscalers and it turned out to be an amazing decision...
|
| Generous free tiers, pricing scales very competitively after
| that, and their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS.
|
| I highly recommend this stack.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Cool. What are you building?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| srcbook.com (not OP, just trolling through their profile).
| Strongbad536 wrote:
| you run compute workloads on there?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yes: https://developers.cloudflare.com/ Look at Cloudflare
| Workers and Cloudflare Workers AI.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| Same here!
| tg180 wrote:
| > their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS
|
| Underrated.
|
| Until recently, all the features were grouped in a very clear
| manner within the dashboard. Now, even Cloudflare is
| complicating its management interface, but they still have a
| long way to go before reaching the level of confusion of AWS
| and GCP.
| rc_kas wrote:
| I feel like my page ranking on Google is lower after switching
| to Cloudflare. Like google is secretly punishing Cloudflare
| hosted pages or something.
|
| I have zero evidence to prove anything. Just gut feeling.
| Anyone else notice this?
| Shakahs wrote:
| Because they own the CDN and most of the bandwidth is from
| peering, so it essentially costs them nothing. Netlify on the
| other hand has to pay per GB to AWS.
| jsheard wrote:
| Netlify manages to be wildly overpriced even by AWS standards,
| CloudFront starts at about $85/TB, which isn't cheap by any
| means, but that turns into $550/TB(!!) if you go through
| Netlify. They have some of the most obscene bandwidth pricing
| in the industry by a huge margin, and to add insult to injury
| they don't allow you to set a spending limit either.
| neya wrote:
| It's not really free. One day, you get a call from their sales
| team saying "you're straining our network". I kid you not. We
| were on a business plan and still got this. When we met them in
| person, we were asked to upgrade to a $2000+ per month plan. From
| a $200/mo plan. That's a 10x increase. I searched their TOS,
| nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns
| out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay. We
| refused. That really left a bad taste in my mouth.
|
| Today, I refuse to recommend any client or startup to them
| because of this extremely unethical practice. All around, I'm not
| sure they deserve so much positive press/attention, especially
| after screwing some of their own employees (one even got super
| famous live streaming the firing).
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| You should report that to them. Their CTO multiple times said
| this in HN.
| dubcanada wrote:
| To be honest, sales people are sales people. Their job is to
| sell you on packages, and they will generally do anything to
| get you to upgrade.
|
| It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service.
| They asked you and gave you a "canned" reason.
|
| If you don't mind me asking you had a $200 a month plan, and
| changed to another provider. Did the plan price go up or down?
| threatofrain wrote:
| If CF is calling you like this then I'm not sure how you're
| interpreting this as a donation call. They're basically
| saying you're about to be fired as a customer.
|
| Except now there isn't a clear formalization on how much you
| were expecting to pay or how much runway or patience CF has
| left for you.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > It's not like they threatened to remove you from their
| service
|
| They routinely do exactly this
| bradgessler wrote:
| Sales people work within the policies & frameworks set by a
| sales organizations whose goals and strategies are set by
| said organizations leadership team.
|
| This isn't a random sales person gone rouge--its a matter of
| how Cloudflare chooses to do business with and treat their
| customers.
|
| The problem with this approach for customers is that it makes
| there costs entirely unpredictable. What's the stop them from
| increasing prices from $2,000 on the enterprise plan to
| $20,000 on the enterprise plus plan?
| johntash wrote:
| Did you move from cf to someone else, or are you still using
| them?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I like Bunny because it's prepaid
| gruez wrote:
| >I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about
| "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy
| tactic to get you to pay.
|
| You seem to be pretty cagey about what your usage actually was,
| and whether it was indeed "straining their network". Were you
| using more resources/bandwidth than a typical customer would?
| Most ToS contains clauses that allows the vendor to
| unilaterally cut customers off if they're an excessive burden,
| even if there aren't explicit quotas, or are explicitly
| "unlimited". ISPs don't let you saturate your 1Gbit connection
| 24 hours a day, even on "unlimited" plans, but I wouldn't call
| it a "scam" if they told you to upgrade to an enterprise plan.
| rovr138 wrote:
| straining is also ambiguous and disingenuous.
|
| if we believe the plan was $200 and the upgrade was to a
| $2,000 plan.. there's no way a $2,000 user would be
| "straining" Cloudflare's network.
|
| We spend more than that. If we are putting a strain on
| Cloudflare, they're not at the scale we think they're at.
| gruez wrote:
| Seems like you don't really have any issue with the
| underlying business decision (ie. pushing a high usage
| customer to a higher tier plan) and are only upset about
| the wording the salesperson used. All the points you've
| made applies to ISPs as well. Most neighborhoods are
| probably provisioned well enough that a single customer
| saturating their 1gbit connection isn't going to bring the
| network down to its knees, but that doesn't mean ISPs
| aren't justified in pushing such customers to a higher tier
| offering (eg. dedicated circuit).
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Why are you straining so hard and spending so many words
| to defend general scumminess.
|
| Invisible limits are an anti-pattern, simple as that.
| gruez wrote:
| See my other comment[1]. I'm not sure why you're
| straining so hard and spending so many words to defend
| "general scumminess", like the the right of a gambling
| site hosting dozens of domains (to evade government bans)
| on shared cloudflare IPs, or people expecting to get
| 1.2PB of bandwidth served out of a $200 CDN plan.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42717005
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This "straining the network" is the "unlimited pto" of b2b
| saas. It's all bullshit. Nebulous and you don't really know
| what you're getting into until you're too locked in and they
| squeeze you. Don't do business with companies like this if
| you can avoid it. It's the Datadog model of we'll charge you
| whatever and make it extremely complicated for you to
| understand why you're being billed $x this month.
| vvillena wrote:
| Well, Cloudflare seems pretty cagey about what their prices
| are, given they don't reveal them to clients until they are
| completely tied in.
| bogwog wrote:
| I've seen enough stories exactly like this from other CF
| customers to believe it.
| gruez wrote:
| I've seen enough stories exactly like this, where it turned
| out such usage is unusual and a move to a higher priced
| plan was justified (eg.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482505,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640016,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336515), that I find
| it suspicious whenever people act surprised and outraged at
| cloudflare upselling them, but are cagey about what exactly
| their site's doing.
| throitallaway wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Cloudflare's enterprise pricing model. It
| seems like they'll charge you whatever they'd like to when
| renewal time comes around, and will play with the numbers to
| ensure you stay around whatever total they'd like to see. They
| charge for each protected domain, in addition to sane metrics
| like bandwidth utilization and number of requests. Charging
| thousands per protected domain per year is scummy. Maybe I'm
| just too used to AWS/GCloud/et al. pricing that actually bills
| me on utilization rather than arbitrary metrics.
| specialp wrote:
| This is a growing pattern in hosting like Netlify and headless
| CMSs like Sanity. Their free model is "generous" and then if
| you go production and start to have overages you get billed
| exorbitantly for bandwidth and API requests. It is essentially
| a trap. Once you hit those limits you have very little
| negotiating power when you hit the "call us for pricing" level
| and you get outrageous quotes. It costs them very little to run
| these services so if they can net some minnows that become
| whales, that is almost pure profit.
| tootie wrote:
| It's the double-edged sword of both free plans and
| "transparent pricing". If you just click "buy" and enter your
| CC info you're subject to their somewhat arbitrary terms of
| service. Service is cheap and reliable so you don't ask
| questions. But they can just boot you and there's very little
| recourse. It's why most big companies want a signed contract
| that's binding and comes with some kind of mandatory dispute
| resolution or penalties for non-compliance.
| ejcx wrote:
| We're incredibly biased since several members of our team worked
| at Cloudflare, but we spend ~$20 a month on Cloudflare for our
| startup and it is fantastic.
|
| - Marketing videos on stream
|
| - Pages for multiple nextjs sites
|
| - DNS + Domain Reg
|
| - cloudflared / tunnels for local dev
|
| - zaraz tag manager
|
| - Page rules / redirect rules for vanity redirects we want to do.
|
| The list gets longer every day and the amount of problems we can
| solve quickly is amazing. The value to money is unmatched
| binary132 wrote:
| Why does any paid platform have a generous free tier?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Right, and why don't all products get priced at cost+? Such a
| puzzle.
|
| /s
|
| Pricing is not about today's balance sheet, but about the
| future of the business. If pricing ever becomes about making
| this month's payroll, the business is probably in trouble.
| There are exceptions, especially for small businesses.
| naiv wrote:
| We are currently developing a project and were very open
| regarding the provider and none came close to Cloudflare pages.
|
| The free geo information in the header alone is already worth it
| for us so we save money on purchasing a separate ip db but also
| don't waste time for the separate db call looking up the
| location.
|
| I was very disappointed by their kv store latency and that d1
| does not replicate yet. So we ended up comparing a poor man
| solution in just providing the json at a http endpoint on our
| webserver vs. quite a few global kv providers.
|
| We set up a promise race and did thourough global tests. Doing
| the http request beat the global kv store providers by far, even
| if they have a pop in syd, the cloudflare http request to europe
| or the us was still faster. We are using Argo though, this might
| have helped as well.
| Oras wrote:
| What was the latency for the KV store?
| naiv wrote:
| between 300 - 1200ms , also very random
|
| I then found bejamas where you can do some nice comparisons
| like: https://bejamas.com/compare/turso-vs-upstash-redis-vs-
| cloudf...
| Oras wrote:
| Thanks! I never thought it could be this bad. 1200 ms is a
| lifetime for a key-value cache.
| sjoedev wrote:
| Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I'm wary of what might happen
| when they need to become profitable. Could this be another case
| of a company offering an excellent, cheap product while being
| propped up by investors, only to later have an "enshittification"
| [2] phase where they aggressively cut corners and increase prices
| to make a profit?
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/market-
| data/quotes/NET/financials/annual...
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Leaving out stock compensation in a non-gaap perspective would
| show they are close. Granted compensation is a real cost to
| value of shares, It's not as wide a delta as many other
| companies.
|
| I would suspect they're going the other way and will continue
| to double down into new areas of services to expand their
| product line.
| gruez wrote:
| >Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I'm wary of what might
| happen when they need to become profitable
|
| The unit economics are sound. They have 76% gross margin, so
| it's not like they're selling $10 movie tickets for $8, and
| unlike companies like uber, they're probably not using their
| marketing spend to buy revenue (eg. spending $20 in promo
| credits to get $50 worth of sales). There's nothing wrong with
| a business that "unprofitable" when their unit economics work
| out, and are plowing their profits back into expanding the
| business.
| adrr wrote:
| Cash flow positive. Margins look healthy. Spend lots of R&D
| which i would attribute to having $1.6B(2023) of capital on
| hand and being cash flow positive.
| srmatto wrote:
| Cloudflare requires a $3,000/year business plan in order to have
| custom name servers. Namecheap offers this for free.
|
| "Account/Zone custom nameservers are available for zones on
| Business or Enterprise plans. Via API or on the dashboard."
|
| Update: I say this to further illustrate how they operate.
| edelbitter wrote:
| Source:
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/nameservers/custom-nam...
| johnklos wrote:
| This seems like little more than a sales pitch. For instance:
|
| > Second, companies like Cloudflare benefit from a fast, secure
| internet. If the internet is fast and reliable, more people will
| want to use it.
|
| The author doesn't seem to have anything to say with any more
| substance than this gem.
| nine_k wrote:
| No, it's not an empty statement. When your site takes 5 seconds
| to start loading, even sometimes, or if it sometimes fails to
| load some image or CSS file completely, many visitors will be
| unhappy to have to return to it, and a lot will just close the
| tab without waiting.
|
| The pleonasm is not helpful though.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| As other commenters have mentioned, it is a bit of a bait and
| switch and not "truly" unlimited - but pretty much this is true
| for any XaaS that advertises "unlimited" anything. That said
| though, I still find cloudflare's free basic product incredibly
| good for the price. The proxy will handle a pretty good amount of
| load before you get any sales emails. I use some of their
| enterprise products and I'm extremely pleased, so it is a little
| hard to complain when I am getting great value out of it. I am
| however always wary of this not remaining the case forever. For
| what it is though, I can't really find many comparable products.
| It's sort of like datadog to me - yes, it's expensive, yes, their
| pricing can be a bit nebulous and feels bad at times, but the
| product is still _extremely_ good for what I need it to do and
| until that changes I guess I 'll just keep forking over dollars.
| That seems to be the way of things now.
| blue_light_man wrote:
| Top of the funnel.
| whiskey-one wrote:
| I understand interconnecting Cloudflare's network and hosting
| their servers by ISPs builds a beefier Internet and that's great,
| but isn't it potentially problematic for a small number of
| vendors to become a significant part of the network? What happens
| if they go out of business? Are we no worse off than before, or
| do we worry about equipment that's in limbo unless purchased by
| another business? Or is it potentially bad but inevitable since
| investing in growing the Internet requires deep pockets so it
| will always be the bigger corporations owning large chunks of the
| network?
|
| Infra like Internet cables under the ocean are to me more obvious
| things to be purchased by other businesses. ISP-collocated
| content servers that came to be due to discovered mutual benefits
| of content and service provider seem to me more complex in terms
| of managing them in the face of business changes.
| a_imho wrote:
| Piggybacking on the thread a little, anyone has experience to
| share using Pages or Workers at scale? Perhaps I bought too much
| into the JAMstack hype, but it seems like a much more convenient
| approach compared to the k8s rube goldberg machines every other
| shop is utilizing (assuming they work and scale as advertised on
| the tin). Wondering what are some drawbacks or even show
| stoppers.
| asadm wrote:
| I have done a few products, X million WAU, workers/pages scale
| really well. I haven't had any issues. I know docker/k8s
| extensively (and have scaled them previously).
|
| Drawback: less nodejs api, so limited apis.
| TimLeland wrote:
| Cloudflare offers a lot for free. I think they are able to cover
| the free users from how much they charge enterprise customers.
| hk1337 wrote:
| It's kind of the same reason Google does it. There's a saying
| about this that I do not recall how it is phrased but it's
| something to the effect of, if you're not paying for it you're
| the product.
|
| You're the guinea pig to help them make the product better for
| paying clients and to help them market the product usefulness to
| those that pay.
| zer0x4d wrote:
| I run a $3m/yr startup on a free tier Cloudflare account. To this
| day I have no idea why Cloudflare is not charging us for
| anything. I would have happily paid them for their service
| ArlenBales wrote:
| Without knowing your bandwidth usage, it's probably because
| your bandwidth isn't that high? They're not charging based on
| revenue. Every major law firm in the world could probably be
| hosted on Cloudflare Free Tier with a basic static website, but
| still make $100+ M per year.
| zyx_db wrote:
| Hey Matt! DB here from last summer haha!
|
| cool to see you started writing! looking forward to seeing more,
| keep it up
| MattSayar wrote:
| Thanks! More to come, and hopefully see you back in the office
| after you graduate
| Fokamul wrote:
| Without Cloudflare there would be many poor malware coders and
| phishers. Cloudflare are saints!
| pier25 wrote:
| Pages probably consumes less than 10% of resources compared to
| their free CDN. Probably even less than 1%.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| I'm going to have to ask you to keep your voice down, sir.
| dceddia wrote:
| Tin foil hat on?
|
| I suspect they also benefit from the massive amounts of data
| gathering. A huge portion of the entire internet's traffic is
| going through Cloudflare, SSL-terminated. It's like being plugged
| into the server-side (unblockable) access log of every website.
| That would be worth a lot.
|
| I also suspect their support of web attestation is not
| benevolent. With the level of control they already have, it's
| increasingly possible for them to flip a switch, with the full
| support of Apple and Google and Microsoft, so that only
| authorized devices have access to the web. curl on Linux? Not
| authorized. Outdated OS? It's up to Apple whether they feel like
| signing your request - can't expect them to support it forever! -
| but also you can't access that website without their approval.
|
| I feel like a conspiracy theorist here but this stuff just seems
| way too close at hand.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Between let's encrypt and Caddy defaults, SSL termination is
| easy these days and cloudlfares insistence on doing it for me
| has turned me away from their products. I gather that reading
| the logs is part and parcel of their product, as the gatekeeper
| to high traffic sites they need all the signals they can get
| for what malicious traffic looks like.
|
| I don't think it requires a conspiracy, it's just a market
| demand for such a product
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| It's always about creating technical debt at your org so that
| when they come to charge you 10-100X what some service is worth
| it's less painful to overpay them than it is to switch.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| As hardware gets cheaper, and economies of scale get bigger, it's
| way way cheaper to provide free stuff than spend on sales and
| marketing.
|
| Works best at the extremes
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I've heard horror stories, where once you hit a certain limit
| they squeeze the hell out of you. And by that point in time you
| are locked in and forced to make a deal.
|
| It's made me not use cloudflare for future products. Just charge
| me upfront what you need to make a healthy margin and let's do
| business!
| richardw wrote:
| In terms of brand, Cloudflare reminds me of Google during the
| idealist "don't be evil" phase. Giving away lots of free and
| benefiting from massive mindshare. I feel similar about
| Cloudflare now as Google then: very positive and wouldn't
| begrudge them any work contracts.
|
| I feel like Google started on an extraction ratchet and hasn't
| stopped. I used to put everything there and now barely anything.
| The change in brand for me has been massive.
| theyknowitsxmas wrote:
| HNer gets his casino site shut down and extorted into buying
| Enterprise for $120k/yr, there's an unwritten limit of 10TB.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808
| frenchtoast8 wrote:
| From the thread and related discussions, Cloudflare's reasons
| probably had nothing to do with bandwidth used. I also recently
| signed up for Cloudflare and pushed 20 TB per month on their
| free plan, I specifically asked Cloudflare if this was okay and
| they said yes. YMMV
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| Probably not the place to post this feedback, but in general I
| get excited about what Cloudflare have been releasing in 2024.
| I'm borderline desperate to try them out in a business setting.
|
| The only thing that really stops me is the horror stories I hear
| about random billing issues and on top of that account closures.
|
| That is something I'm _never_ worried about with AWS.
|
| On the off chance that someone from CF is reading this feedback.
| qwertox wrote:
| For at least the last decade, Cloudflare has made the impression
| on me to be what Google wanted to be, in terms of "being good".
|
| I can't remember when it was the last time I've heard something
| bad about Cloudflare. Then again, I don't use any of their
| services, even if I have an old account with them. I never saw
| the need to use them, but like what I see about the products they
| offer.
|
| They seem to be doing much more good to the internet than causing
| trouble.
| folgoris wrote:
| Are you serious? It seems that cloudflare is one of those
| companies that doesn't make itself heard much because it's
| better that people don't know how much pieces of sh*t they are.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| This strategy works incredibly well and it's a continuation of
| their free dns proxy / caching service. It's a no brainer: the
| quality of the free services is unbeatable.
|
| At the same time, everytime you need to buy something, you'll
| think "should I add a new cloud service or just buy Cloudflare?"
|
| I don't like their almost monopoly-position but it's so good I
| use Cloudflare for all my projects and I keep recommending
| Cloudflare to all my clients.
|
| In that regard, they remind me of a young Google.
| hacka22 wrote:
| you forgot to mention that Cloudflare is the by far the largest
| MITM operation on this planet
|
| oh, btw, hello NSA o/
| greenchair wrote:
| here's a piece of life advice for you: if it don't make sense,
| theres a buck in it.
| _benj wrote:
| I find myself often suspicious of "free" tiers, because it seems
| to be that 1. the terms can change at any time or 2. "free" can
| be removed at any time.
|
| I had used CF Pages and I really really liked all the tools it
| gave me, but free didn't sit well with me. I switched to CDN
| bunny.net for hosting my personal site and DNS and I pay $1/mo,
| which is their monthly minimun payment. It doesn't have facny
| stuff like github intergation or such, but I feel more at peace
| actually knowing what I'm paying for.
|
| I wish CF would have a personal pricing level, I'd be more than
| happy to pay them and have a customer relationship instead of a
| freemium user relationship with them!
| nycdatasci wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but also curious why Cloudflare doesn't put
| more effort into policing content of Pages, which are frequently
| used by bad actors.
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflares-d...
|
| Examples: https://pending-revew.pages.dev/
| https://r2-cmq.pages.dev/ https://ampgoat-ligaciputra.pages.dev/
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Everything has a limit.
| joshlk wrote:
| Other than bandwidth, is there any other performance differences
| between Cloudflare and GitHub Pages?
| ingen0s wrote:
| CF super fan since they released. Nice write up btw.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-15 23:00 UTC)