Comment by bawolff

> 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.