Comment by jsheard
8 months ago
I think it being difficult to grok is the point, if they laid down exactly how much they want you to pay for bandwidth then it would be easy to go price shopping between them and the competition. But when it's "free" bandwidth, with a fuzzy line where it stops being free, and ambiguous pricing when it does, they can hook people in with a great deal and try to shake them down later.
I still encounter people who refuse to believe that CF bandwidth isn't really free, when you can easily demonstrate that it's not by just observing who uses them. If their bandwidth truly was free and unlimited with no catch whatsoever then every bandwidth giant like Imgur would use CF, but they don't. Imgur uses Fastly, probably because it's cheaper than CFs "free".
Free hits obscuring ruinous costs is a time honored strategy of drug dealers and all kinds of shady businesses.
I suspect this is the answer, and it's just "momentum". once you're at a location and you're doing considerable "stuff" the move becomes painful and $200 more a month doesn't seem a lot if you're a company, but if they do that every 6 months or so before you know it's $1000 a month
I think an order of magnitude more is not unusual. OP was being asked to pay $120K a year.
Yeah our pretty large company switched to CloudFlare thinking of all the dollars they would save with little research but within a year were back at Akamai.
And Akamai is very expensive.