Because they give a lot away and post blog posts attacking AWS folks think they are cheap. But a lot of their free stuff may be in the marketing budget. The issue here is:
1) Their paid offerings for their core product, CDN, does not have a public pricing guide. That's a BAD sign if they claim to be competing on price. So we can pretty safely assume their paid service bandwidth charges are NOT the 80X cheaper than amazon despite their claims here.
2) They hype their bandwidth alliance. I tried following this up on Azure, it's basically all call a sales person / maybe you'll get a deal type stuff. Smoke and mirrors again.
3) If you actually try to use their CDN to serve something high bandwidth (games / software updates / video streaming) that is going to violate some type of clause which says that the free CDN is not REALLY unlimited.
4) Financially they spend a mind boggling amount on sales costs. Between sales costs and cost of sales I think they are negative relative to revenue.
BTW - If you try any of the other "free" and "unlimited" providers (for $5/month etc) you will also find out once you try to move some real data volumes (video etc) - it's all a lie over and over.
Same things with geo issues. Cloudflare claims to have "one" price globally. These are almost alwyas false claims. It's easy to test - setup a stream into a high cost area, stream a bunch of video there - you'll usually get a call over some tricky TOS issue they pull out.
In short, if you want pay and forget, there is a reason the big cloud players have a business still.
Enterprise customer here. throw away account, since not sure how much I should be able to divulge...
1: we are paying (ballpark) 5-10k for our account. We have 5-10 domains on the enterprise plan, and we have roughly 100m requests per month plus about 70TB bandwidth, IIRC... Mind you, we have other sites that are on Pro ($20) or business ($200) plans and they are coming in at around a million requests a day (only about 2-3Gb a day) and no one complains.. could be the 5-10k we spend a month with them makes them think twice... Most of our cost is for the 24/7 tech support, regular meetings, etc. extra domains are a somewhat fixed cost (little over double a business plan domain) and that gives us extra features.
2: for Azure and BW Alliance, we were told you need to use a storage account and use "Internet Routing" not "Azure Routing" for the account. Azure routing is, IIRC, 12c per Gig. Internet routing is closer to 8c... Cant see an option for Servers, but I think Internet Routing might work for them too...
3: Any proof of this? I do know there is a limit of 256Mbyte for free account files, but not sure about what the limits on Pro or Business accounts...
I love cloudflare, but related to your last point can they still be called a startup? They’re a publicly traded company whose stock price is currently in freefall.
CloudFlare's stock price changes are related to narratives from the past 2 years rapidly fading, like the retail investing world finally learning what a CDN did right at the start of COVID, and expectations of the interest rate environment shifting. AFAIK there has been no material news to justify what's happening to its stock recently, other than many large players rushing to exit extremely crowded trades they all had in common.
There is currently a widespread fear that quantitative tightening could arrive very rapidly, with disastrous effects on high multiplier tech stocks and other debt-fuelled businesses. They've all been getting hammered in uniform since at least December.
For those following along, the aws cloud front price for 70 TB / 100m requests runs $5,400 or so. Discounts available if you will do a one year term - say 20%. Ie, they are in ballpark.
I can believe cloudflare is cheaper for sure, but it’s not your an idiot for using aws level I don’t think. And aws is printing money.
I once paid $3 per GB (6 figures per year) way way back so this all looks cheap to me.
As the good old Tanenbaum quote goes: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway".
I work a lot with video production and mailing SD cards or driving around hard drives is still the best way to transfer data quickly and cheaply. The cloud is too expensive (both storage and egress) and P2P (Syncthing) is too slow with more than 2 contributors. Despite most of my regular team now having FTTH (except me!!), we still manually transfer media files and use P2P for the rest of the project.
Azure's pricing for data can be weird (or used to be.
Didn't they used to charge for transfers between resources in different AZ's in same region? And VNET peering I think was chargeable, so you'd have situations where within a region you'd be paying outbound AND INBOUND charges.
Anyways, the little I looked, the "free" bandwidth alliance data transfer really wasn't free from what I could see but I didn't look too hard.
Its not 12c per gig, its 8.75c per gig for Microsoft Routing... (at least from Europe and NA) and 8c for Internet Routing... Not a massive saving... Mind you, if you are based in South America, you go from 18.1c per gig down to 12...
For Us, mostly based in Europe, it would be a difference of around 995 per month on Azure Bandwidth costs, if all our bandwidth just came from Azure. Same for South America is 6 grand in savings...
They don’t list because they are still in the “what the market will bear” model of pricing.
My experience was their sales team talked a good game up until the time to bid, and then Akamai closed enough of the pricing gap to not make it worth switching. Cloudflare seemed like great technology but their pricing suggested they had already won the business. I can only imagine how they treat existing customers once there are switching costs.
To summarize your point, yes, Cloudflare is not entirely free for all. Cloudflare specifically states why they have this sort of model, from their S-1 [0]:
> Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.
That's the value they get for providing the service for 'free' for quite a lot of websites that aren't moving real data volumes. For millions of websites, this is a sweet deal for them since it still saves them hundreds of dollars in bandwidth a month while they provide enough value to CF indirectly to not be considered a loss-leading customer (in which the customer would get "the call" saying they need to start directly paying for their usage of CF).
So is it an opaque, customer-hostile pricing strategy? Sure, but even image boards doing petabytes a month serving images are within the realm of never needing to pay for their direct usage of the service since CF still sees that as a worthwhile marketing and intelligence source. It's only when you actively cause them to lose money (such as streaming video in eg. the Oceania region) or start proxying raw binaries on a domain that proxies nothing else [1] that CF doesn't see a reason to keep your domain around as a charity case.
Haha. 21x for Telestra. Total crazy. They must be getting it from someone though, but that is abysmal. Good on cloudflare for detailing it - it's not just cloudflare who is impacted, the fees charged by others are also very high in these areas.
Point 3 is very true, however as far as competing on price, CloudFlare was a fraction of the cost of cloudfront when we had priced it out, despite the nontransparent pricing.
This includes the CDN product, workers, security services like Access and Teams. Only the Enterprise plan and other products require negotiation, but the majority of customers are easily covered by the standard options.
> "high bandwidth (games / software updates / video streaming) that is going to violate some type of clause"
The clauses are publicly stated in their terms. The CDN is for typical website assets and not large files, but many sites are running TBs of bandwidth for free or with the regulars plans though. Large file delivery requires different technical setup from small/dynamic requests, and there are CDNs specialized for that. You can also rent unmetered servers or interconnects yourself and get much better rates instead of using a CDN.
But I used to play with the "free" and "unlimited" players - and it's almost always the same.
The network quality is crap.
The network cannot sustain bandwidth during periods you need it.
There are hidden TOS stuff (sometimes made up) that they grab you with if you start using "too much" of the "unlimited" free service.
They are losing money so cannot sustain the pricing.
Pricing is opaque or not aligned with underlying costs.
Or they just flat out will not disclose their "80x cheaper" pricing because it's a total lie that it's 80x cheaper.
In short, I'm tired of that as I've gotten older.
Let's take cloudflare. If I egress 1PB of 8K video 100% into India per day, my guess is their per minute "upfront" stream pricing generates a call from some sales dude. Oh, you violated xx/yy/zz, we can't support that etc. Ugh. Same with their CDN stuff. If I start doing 100% egress into South Africa - wham - some weird call. I don't even have to look anymore to know how this goes.
If I strung together all their bandwidth alliance folks and started moving AWS Snowmobile data around per week (100PB per week, distributing it using the bandwidth alliance backbone for "free", without using other significant paid services) you get the call.
I ask simply, where is their 80x cheaper CDN pricing? OH, asking for pricing, you must work for AWS. It's pathetic really - that's the response? Point me to the webpage for this.
Before any discounts for committed use (normally 12 months or more) AWS Cloudfront goes down to $0.02/GB. The supposed 80x cheaper Cloudflare price is then in the $0.0002/GB range. IF you actually believed they had their costs low enough to offer this, they would clean up. Instead it is almost certainly a lie - but I'm happy to be proven wrong. If you do have needs this cheap, you might look at building your own CDN (see Netflix and friends).
The real irony is they do blog posts using AWS pricing, but don't release their own. I use cloudflare, I think they are great as a hobby level user of their stuff. But stuff for work goes to GCP (in past) and more recently AWS and Azure (which has a big in these days with office 365 / directory / remote desktop stuff into bigger players despite what may be underlying tech weaknesses).
The amount of sales calls and PowerPoints are crazy with CloudFlare. AWS makes it soooooo much easier to spend money and their sales are so less naggy.
Because they give a lot away and post blog posts attacking AWS folks think they are cheap. But a lot of their free stuff may be in the marketing budget. The issue here is:
1) Their paid offerings for their core product, CDN, does not have a public pricing guide. That's a BAD sign if they claim to be competing on price. So we can pretty safely assume their paid service bandwidth charges are NOT the 80X cheaper than amazon despite their claims here.
2) They hype their bandwidth alliance. I tried following this up on Azure, it's basically all call a sales person / maybe you'll get a deal type stuff. Smoke and mirrors again.
3) If you actually try to use their CDN to serve something high bandwidth (games / software updates / video streaming) that is going to violate some type of clause which says that the free CDN is not REALLY unlimited.
4) Financially they spend a mind boggling amount on sales costs. Between sales costs and cost of sales I think they are negative relative to revenue.
BTW - If you try any of the other "free" and "unlimited" providers (for $5/month etc) you will also find out once you try to move some real data volumes (video etc) - it's all a lie over and over.
Same things with geo issues. Cloudflare claims to have "one" price globally. These are almost alwyas false claims. It's easy to test - setup a stream into a high cost area, stream a bunch of video there - you'll usually get a call over some tricky TOS issue they pull out.
In short, if you want pay and forget, there is a reason the big cloud players have a business still.