Comment by kordlessagain
6 hours ago
Your argument is technically flawed.
In a CDN, customers consume bandwidth; they do not contribute it. If Cloudflare adds 1 million free customers, they do not magically acquire 1 million extra pipes to the internet backbone. They acquire 1 million new liabilities that require more infrastructure investment.
All you are doing is echoing their pitch book. Of course they want to skim their share of the pie.
I imagine every single customer is provisioned based on some peak expected typical traffic and that's what they base their capital investment in bandwidth on.
However most customers are rarely at their peak, this gives you tremendous spare capacity to use to eat DDoS attacks, assuming that the attacks are uncorrelated. This gives you huge amounts of capacity that's frequently doing nothing. Cloudflare advertise this spare capacity as "DDoS protection."
I suppose in theory it might be possible to massively optimise utilisation of your links, but that would be at the cost of DDoS protection and might not improve your margin very meaningfully, especially is customers care a lot about being online.
> In a CDN, customers consume bandwidth; they do not contribute it
They contribute money which buys infrastructure.
> If Cloudflare adds 1 million free customers,
Is the free tier really customers? Regardless most of them are small that it doesn't cost cloudflare much anyways. The infrastructure is already there anyways. Its worth it to them for the good will it generates which leads to future paying customers. It probably also gives them visibility into what is good vs bad traffic.
1 million small sites could very well cost less to cloudflare than 1 big site.
You're missing the economies of scale part.
OP is saying it's cheaper overall for a 10 million customer company to add infrastructure for 1 million more than it is for a 10,000 customer company to add infrastructure for 1000 more people.
If you're looking at this as a "share of the pie", it's probably not going to make sense. The industry is not zero sum.
You aren't understanding economy of scale, and peak to average ratios.
The same reason I use cloud compute -- elastic infrastructure because I can't afford the peaks -- is the same reason large service providers "work".
It's funny how we always focus on Cloudflare, but all cloud providers have this same concentration downside. I think it's because Cloudflare loves to talk out of both sides of their mouth.
The "economies of scale" defense of Cloudflare ignores a fundamental reality: 23.8 million websites run on Cloudflare's free tier versus only 210,000 paying customers or so. Free users are not a strategic asset. They are an uncompensated cost, full stop. Cloudflare doesn't absorb this loss out of altruism; they monetize it by building AI bot-detection systems, charging for bot mitigation, and extracting threat intelligence data. Today's outage was caused by a bug in Cloudflare's service to combat bots.
That's AI bots, BTW. Bots like Playwright or Crawl4AI, which provide a useful service to individuals using agentic AI. Cloudflare is hostile to these types of users, even though they likely cost websites nothing to support well.
The "scale saves money" argument commits a critical error: it counts only the benefits of concentration while externally distributing the costs.
Yes, economies of scale exist. But Cloudflare's scale creates catastrophic systemic risk that individual companies using cloud compute never would. An estimated $5-15 billion was lost for every hour of the outage according to Tom's Guide. That cost didn't disappear. It was transferred to millions of websites, businesses, and users who had zero choice in the matter.
Again, corporations shitting on free users. It's a bad habit and a dark pattern.
Even worse, were you hoping to call an Uber this morning for your $5K vacation? Good luck.
This is worse than pure economic inefficiency. Cloudflare operates as an authorized man-in-the-middle to 20% of the internet, decrypting and inspecting traffic flows. When their systems fail, not due to attacks, but to internal bugs in their monetization systems, they don't just lose uptime.
They create a security vulnerability where encrypted connections briefly lose their encryption guarantee. They've done this before (Cloudbleed), and they'll do it again. Stop pretending to have rational arguments with irrational future outcomes.
The deeper problem: compute, storage, and networking are cheap. The "we need Cloudflare's scale for DDoS protection" argument is a circular justification for the very concentration that makes DDoS attractive in the first place. In a fragmented internet with 10 CDNs, a successful DDoS on one affects 10% of users. In a Cloudflare-dependent internet, a DDoS, or a bug, affects 50%, if Cloudflare is unable to mitigate (or DDoSs themselves).
Cloudflare has inserted themselves as an unremovable chokepoint. Their business model depends on staying that chokepoint. Their argument for why they must stay a chokepoint is self-reinforcing. And every outage proves the model is rotten.