Comment by nickcw

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.