Comment by ignoramous
2 years ago
> What is the catch? Am I missing something?
Some say, Cloudflare throws the ToS rule-book at you once you cross 5TB/mo (or whatever the threshold is; we're at multiple-TBs but no one from Cloudflare has thrown as much as an email at us). That said, Cloudflare's absurdly high bandwidth rates for Specturm (their L4 load balancer) [0] remains a mystery.
Pretty recently, Cloudflare blogged about AWS' potential 80x markup on egress [1]. That is, the $90/TB AWS charges its customers must cost them a measly $1 or so.
Cloudflare in 2014 blogged about how they work relentlessly to bring down bandwidth costs by peering aggressively where possible [2] (which apparently means $0 for unlimited bandwidth [3]). And where they can't / don't [4], egress is 5x (est) the ingress (one pays for the higher among the two), but this creates an opportunity for an arbitrage and give away DDoS protection for free.
This is pretty similar to Amazon's free-shipping offer for Prime customers despite it being one of the biggest loss makers to their retail business. Prime basically has since forced Amazon to bring down costs through building expensive and vast distribution & logistics network that spawns the globe. Doing so was a considerable drain on the resources in the short-run, but in the long run, it has become an unbreachable moat around its largest business.
Analysts like Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) and Matthew Eash (hhhypergrowth.com) have written in detail about Cloudflare's modus operandii over the years, with both agreeing that Cloudflare's model is so brilliantly disruptive that even Clayton Christensen would be proud of it.
[0] $1/GB! https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004172187...
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
> Some say, Cloudflare throws the ToS rule-book at you once you cross 5TB/mo
5TB a month sounds low. Sure, it's plenty for a website and many apps, but not much if you require file transfers.
This is probably the catch. Cloudflare is, unfortunately, very ambiguous at times. This view is shared by many users on their forums as well.