[treis]

It does seem like CF is coming in and burning down the market instead of capturing part of it. Free is cool for developers but not exactly great for profits.

I can see a long term strategy where the next unicorn starts on CF and eventually pays them money. But it also feels like the big fish will migrate to AWS leaving CF with the cheap clients.

[coenhyde]

I feel your view of CF is about 4 years old. Combine CF's Cloud strategy with their IT/Security offerings (eg Cloudflare One), they are effectively building a new layer on the internet. Very sticky and hard to replicate unless you cover all bases like Cloudflare. Though, it might usher in a dark age if they are too successful. They could end up owning the internet.

[treis]

I'm talking specifically about R2 and other offerings where they're competing more directly with AWS.

Their other stuff is where you want to be in business. Market leading technology that you can charge a premium for.

[coenhyde]

Fair enough. Though I think these cloud products need to be viewed in the context of their other services. The value you from of using these cloud products isn't necessarily their direct feature set. It is that the network activity stays within Cloudflare and when combined with their other products, can't really be done easily with other services.

[brightball]

IMO the services that Cloudflare offers more than justify the price when you have even a minimal budget to pay for them.

[headphoneswater]

Free at a small scale sure, my company pays CF a bundle and we're not a unicorn