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by bengeren 2488 days ago
How does CloudFlare themselves afford to give bandwidth for free? I understand that I can pay $20/mo for pro account but they also have a $0/mo option with fewer bells and whistles. What gives them the advantage to charge nothing for bandwidth?
2 comments
eastdakota 2488 days ago
Because we’re peered with Backblaxe (as well as AWS). There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrangements, but, once in place, there’s no incremental cost. That’s why we have similar agreements to Backblaze in place with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, etc. It’s pretty shameful, actually, that AWS has so far refused. When using Cloudflare, they don’t pay for the bandwidth, and we don’t pay for the Bandwidth, so why are customers paying for the bandwidth. Amazon pretends to be customer-focused. This is a clear example where they’re not.
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quicksilver03 2488 days ago
Maybe Amazon is afraid of sabotaging Cloudfront and losing revenue coming from outgoing data transfers?
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bengeren 2488 days ago
Thank you for clarifying. If I were to use a Google cloud service from a Cloudflare Worker would there be no bandwidth charges? That would change everything for us.
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ubercow13 2488 days ago
Bandwidth between GCP and Cloudflare isn't free, unlike with Backblaze, but the cost is reduced.

https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/docs/how-to/cdn-interc...

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qaq 2488 days ago
as AWS is primary cash cow for Amazon I doubt they would ever change that. Bandwidth fees are a key profit maker for them on the other hand AWS's crazy bandwidth pricing is prob. pretty beneficial to driving customers towards you guys.
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mikehotel 2488 days ago
Their terms indicate it should be used for caching html primarily. So if they find costly abusers, they could use this clause to get them to upgrade to a paid tier.

> 2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.

https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

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