Comment by mdasen
3 days ago
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.
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.
This approach is good as long as the tech stack is open source and portable to other platforms. Otherwise, no matter how good a company/CEO seems ATM, you are ultimately at their mercy if they decide to raise prices significantly.
By using an open, interoperable tech stack, you maintain the freedom to switch to another cloud provider at will.
This shared fluid power also creates a compelling reason for cloud providers to remain honest and competitive in their dealings with customers.
You don't get it.
For most companies free users are just a source of potential paid customers. Such companies squeeze the free users to force them to upgrade. For Cloudflare the millions of free users strengthen their negotiating power with ISPs around the world. We provide value to Cloudflare just by being Cloudflare customers. It is possible that Cloudflare might get a CEO who doesn't understand this, but possible doesn't mean likely.
In any case, I've built my website with Astro, pulling in the Cloudflare integration as a dependency. If I wanted to switch to Vercel or Netlify or whatever else, Astro makes it easy. As for database, others offer managed Sqlite.
If all else fails, I'll ditch the few dynamic parts of the website and deploy the bulk of the site as static html to Github Pages or something.
I have been bitten many times by this usage of free stuff that suddenly starts to cost money so it took a while before I dared to use cloudflare. Have been using it for a few years now without any surprise bills so still happy. Hope I didn't jinx it now. :-)
Think it'll stay the same as long as the CEO (Prince) and CTO (Graham-Cumming) stay in place. Policies might change with a change of leadership, but even then I don't consider it likely.
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.
Have they made a better internet? Many would say that made it worse.
> made it worse.
I'd say this too. I'm giving LetsEncrypt 100% credit for making HTTPS so ubiquitous and free.
But CloudFlare certainly made things worse for "webmaster" era of the Internet, with everything centralized to CloudFlare. I live in Vietnam, and CloudFlare has made things super annoying with their captcha challenges everywhere.
Credit where it's due, CloudFlare pushed HTTP/2 and 3 adoption. More websites are available over IPv6, and their 1.1.1.1 DNS is actually quite nice.
5 replies →
Overall, certainly. There are some negative things people talk about that you might agree with, but look back at what the market was that they disrupted and continue to disrupt. I think that without Cloudflare your registrar would be GoDaddy and your SSL certificates would be from Verisign and your rents would be huge. Backbone wise, that would depend on your region.
2 replies →
I mean, maybe we would have found another solution to DDOS, but as someone who has had a pretty significant attack (on a service which is a clear public good) mitigated for free… it’s pretty nice being able to keep your services online in a hostile environment.
I don’t know the history here, do you have some examples?
My usage is pretty much limited to their DNS.
16 replies →
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.
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.
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
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.
2 replies →
Autocad 10-12 back in college. Cost thousands of dollars in 80s/90s dollars, Not officially allowed to copy, but in reality effortless to copy and run at home for free.
There were other products aiming to be just as good at the same time that were actually protected with dongles and such.
The one that everyone could run at home is the one that took over the world.
Same with Photoshop, and Windows, and plenty of others. Intentional or not, the ease of copying these products is what made them ubiquitous.
1 reply →
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.
I had this exact conversation with a Cloudflare rep a year or two ago, after I told her how I user their free DNS service. She said, "that free service was the best thing we ever did". And we wound up buying their bot management and DDOS services.