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by throwaway_bad 2436 days ago
> If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works.

Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth. I always throw cloudflare on top of anything I do, not because I really need a CDN or anything, but because the bandwidth cost would bankrupt me otherwise. The ceo of cloudflare gave the rationale on why they don't charge:

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791563

3 comments

According to Cloudflare, they do not have any bandwidth pricing arrangement with Microsoft for Azure users.

They also do charge for Enterprise plans, but instead of transparent pricing I got high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate so that as we grow past our current contract, we're forced to upgrade at any point with pricing based solely on our original negotiation.

Frankly, while I save money using Cloudflare over Azure's CDN right now, it's left a very sour taste in my mouth and I'll be jumping their ship as soon as I have time to find a suitable alternative.

> high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate

If you have the ability to shift your entire enterprise CDN away from them, why not first try renegotiating?

Cloudflare most certainly disables zones on the free plan that use excess bandwidth. Enterprise contracts are also negotiated based on transit and those prices mirror comparable CDN services.
All that tells us is that cloudflare has a different revenue stream. Amazon is a business and they are in the business of making money. If they weren't charging for egress bandwidth they'd just charge for something else.