Comment by kugelblitz
8 hours ago
I use bunny.net for CDN and DNS.
I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.
I also like smaller, independent-ish ompanies that actually care about developers. That's why I use bunny.net, transistor.fm, Plausible Analytics.
>I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
You can just move to another provider at that point. At least when it comes to CDN and DNS there’s literally no vendor lock-in.
You can grab your dns records export them to csv and import somewhere else easily and a CDN is just a file server so you can just give your files to someone else easily.
> At least when it comes to CDN and DNS there’s literally no vendor lock-in.
ehhhh, really depends on which CDN features you're using, and at what volume. Using ESI? VCL? Signed URLs or auth? Any other custom functionality? Are you depending on your provider's bot management features which are "CONTACT FOR PRICE" with other providers? Does your CDN provider have a special egress deal with your cloud provider?
It's possible to picture this being easy in the same way that being multi-cloud or multi-region is easy.
>Using ESI? VCL? Signed URLs or auth? Any other custom functionality? Are you depending on your provider's bot management features which are "CONTACT FOR PRICE" with other providers?
I have no idea what two of those acronyms mean. None of this is part of what a CDN offers.
Yes if you use DDoS protection, or cloudfare’s ZeroTrust or embrace $X proprietary features then what I said no longer applies.
I strictly said DNS and CDN.
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Can anyone say why this is being downvoted? Seems like it makes sense to me, but this isn't my area of expertise.
Predictability matters. The whole point of paying someone else to handle a problem for you is that you don't have to worry about it. If you go all in on a provider and then suddenly find out that you've been switched to a paid plan in the middle of your vacation, that's not a place anyone wants to be. Saying there's no lock-in is nice, but that overlooks the fact that there most definitely is friction. What if there's no mass export? No mass import? Or you need to reset 2FA? Or etc, there's a thousand things that can shoot you in the foot, especially if you have a lot of services you need to migrate.
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For personal projects, I'd rather just pay $2/month and not think about it than get hit with a random bill and scramble to migrate before the next month's bill. Bunny is perfect for this use case where you have a handful of projects that aren't all actively maintained. It just works without hand-holding, and since you're paying for the service, there's no rugpull looming.
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I didn't downvote it, but I don't think migrating away from Cloudflare workers, R2, D1, etc., isn't going to be that easy. Basically, the build these things from the ground up to work optimally for their infra - even the mental model that you have to use is different. If you only narrowly use one part of it, maybe.
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I used to handwave cloud portability. Turns out when you're shipping things and need extra services and you have deadlines, you build against the platform. I think the GP comment was probably expressing wariness of the free cloudflare tier that entices you to build against their APIs and their product shape in a way that inevitably locks you in. Sure, you could migrate, but that's expensive.
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> free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now
Same thing can be applied to low fees services. Look at bitwarden as a recent example, they doubled their prices overnight and hid the announcement in some useless blog post that no one reads, users found out later they are expected to pay doubles in any plan.. why? Because “that low price isn’t feasible we start charging $23 plus tax for premium now”
And the same things you will do to migrate to another when free -> paid you will do when paid_low -> paid_high if the pricing isn’t up to your expectations.
There’s no protection against this, it’s up to the business model change, investors, greed (aka scale up!), you name it, so regardless whether you are paying now or not, always have other options ready for when you need to abandon the ship.
> I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now". > I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.
With free offerings, you’re always helping the supplier in some way. Then you become the product. Which makes it difficult to understand the value exchange; it’s much easier to do so when you’re just paying a fair sum of money.
Logically, the only thing CloudFlare would do is lower or eliminate the free usage tier. For instance, if X million operations are currently free, they make X/2 operations free. I don't think they would do that, but if they did, it couldn't possibly be existential to any viable company.
Practically, any metered supplier can put you out of business. It usually doesn't happen because destruction is mutually assured.
+1 for using smaller, more independent companies in any case!
Except for those cases where CF sales have threatened to kick businesses off the platform unless they join an five or six figure enterprise plan because they've passed some unpublished threshold.
>What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
This logic doesn't hold much water, however. Abrupt changes in pricing or other conditions happen with paid tiers as well
Yes, but combine that with a small-ish provider, this will also hurt them (e.g. see Google Maps price hike). Either way, if I use a service 20x a month and it costs $15, I can handle a hike to $20, that's fine, somewhat predictable. They also relied on those customers, they can't just get rid of all $15 customers.
But if a free offering suddenly says "We are getting rid of free, only starting $899 a month baseline, because we noticed our free users aren't converting and we only want to support enterprise from now on". Well, then I have to move everything.
Still a big price hike can come, but +20% monthly is easier to stomach than if I can't be sure what will happen to the free offering.
Well said. I use bunny.net for many of the same reasons, and to support diversity of solutions in the internet ecosystem.
A change from $2 to $3 is as likely as change from $2 to "call us for quote"
If the rest of the market moved to $20, why would economics of another vendor moving from $2 to $3 at the same time be plausible?
While this will probably happen over time, free* offerings are an anomaly you can‘t build a business on. But even 1€/months minimum is probably too low to cover costs.
If you have the money it’s good