[stillicidious]

I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers. Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewhere of high bandwidth users being cajoled into upgrades.

For an honest bandwidth offer, I'd much sooner consider Fly.io rather than Cloudflare. At least with Fly their true pricing is transparent

edit: speaking of transparency, https://imgur.com/HnlWFUe

[ignoramous]

We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it.

Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to parse or estimate. This is in stark contrast to the simple and straight-forward pricing with Cloudflare, which we pretty much prefer as a small dev shop. So much so that we choose to pay Cloudflare money to host our services even though we've got 5-digit AWS$ credits.

[stillicidious]

The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget. In my experience it always makes sense to consider the latter. At some point that $595/mo. you're saving will appear on a lead sheet, whether it happens today or (similar to e.g. Google Apps) after 5 years. Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth.

I'd always prefer paying for certainty than design a solution built on a lottery.

[windexh8er]

> The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget.

Using any "free" service is generally not free as you scale. That's the freemium model we live in today.

> Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth.

This is an unfortunate assumption with nothing to go on at this point. There is no more certainty with AWS, as implied in your statement, than with any other cloud provider. Not all organizations have an end goal in being the scale of AWS. And not all organizations put profit over product with respect to an outdated perspective that said organizations need to grow 40% YoY for all of eternity to be successful. It's now, more than ever, very clear that AWS profit margins on data transfer are egregious and they spin the backpedal as "Oh - look at us dropping prices, for you, our esteemed customer!". This is the real marketing slight of hand here, not the other way around.

[slownews45]

I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples.

I have been screwed, personally, by enough "free" and "unlimited" offerings to never believe them.

On AWS, all the price changes I've had have been to reduce my costs. This is over a pretty long period.

So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.

Google, sure, they could cancel or 3x your bill (hi Maps API customers etc). AWS does not have that history.

Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing. Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.

[windexh8er]

> I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples.

There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words.

Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn.

> So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.

I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS than with any other major cloud provider with respect to your statement about public companies who "eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth". And then for some reason you pivoted to your own, personal, AWS bill from there. I'm not exactly following the logic.

> Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing.

At this point I'm not sure if your comment is even serious. First of all, please elaborate on "secret pricing". Sounds like serious charges we should all be aware of. Maybe it's with the article from 2019 on The Register about domain pricing? That's not exactly in the context of this thread, but please enlighten the masses.

> Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.

I'd charge you with the same ask on AWS. You seem to imply the "free" tier, on AWS, will provide proper capabilities to host an adult content site. I have strong doubts about this. The logic of this argument is ill conceived at best. Or is your logic just that you can't do this on Cloudflare and that's the root of your argument on why AWS is better? Again, I'm not exactly following your train of thought.

[0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-compelling-economics-...

[slownews45]

Let's be crystal crystal clear here. If I host a high data use video site on AWS, I can calculate what my costs will be. That provides me some certainty with respect to a business plan. Even better, AWS does have a history that is much better than others in terms of pricing stability. This doesn't mean best price.

Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable history of screwing customers.

AWS is offering clear pricing, cloudflare is not. It's really that simple.

This makes me realize that folks just don't understand the value AWS is providing, and is perhaps why they can charge such insane prices.

People with actual money to spend don't want "free" because they don't believe it's actually free.

In terms of cloudflare, they have something like a negative 60% operating margin. The idea of building a business on a company with a negative 60%+ operating margin is insane, either they will go bust or have to raise prices.

AWS by contrast makes money. Because of this, they can shave a point or two off margin to give (another) price reduction.

1TB per month cloudfront, 2M cloudfront functions etc etc. They are under almost NO financial pressure to raise rates.

Cloudflare is under pressure or will be. With VC money perhaps they will get a longer runway.

The "free" offerings are an old story by now.

[georgyo]

Google Apps is likely a poor example of your point. All the people who were using the free tier were never forced to paid plans.

I'm still using free tier Google Apps in multiple places, even though they haven't offered new free accounts for about ten years now. They even still let you create new users for free in these legacy GApps.

Interestingly, I would likely migrate off of GApps to a different paid service if Google changed their minds, however I don't think they have a strong incentive to apply pressure here at long as Gmail.com accounts are free.

[Abishek_Muthian]

> We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it.

That's huge, Could you explain a bit more on how you achieve that? I've been exploring Cloudflare cache, AFAIK for anything not cached by default you need a special page rule e.g. for .html, I tried a wildcard domain.com/* and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Are you using workers to cache specific file types?

[ignoramous]

> Are you using workers to cache specific file types?

Yes: Using Workers as an api gateway and the Cache API as CDN.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...

[Abishek_Muthian]

Thanks, what type of files do you serve through that?

[ignoramous]

executables, raw binary files (like apache parquet), and (rarely) json.

[stunt]

What Cloudflare misses is a simple cost calculator. I don't want to contact sales for it.

[technobabbler]

Interesting. Can you be more specific? Is it possible those prices are conflating different services, e.g. CDN vs network tunnels vs video streaming vs workers vs Pages vs object storage egress?

Even within just the CDN category, Cloudflare does a lot with its basic CDN offering (bot blocking, transformations, dynamic caching, etc.) that other vendors may charge as separate options.

That's not to say I don't believe you, I just wanted to make sure it's apples to apples.

Cloudflare's pricing model only really makes sense, IMO, if you're either a small/med business (which makes it an incredible deal) or if you're working cloud-native using their edge functions (workers, pages, etc.). If you're primarily using them to shield and proxy a LAMP monolith or similar for a large number of users, yeah, I can see how that would get expensive really quickly. There are other vendors who specialize only in that, being a dumb CDN. Cloudflare's value is that they enable completely new architectures based on their network topology... you can't easily do something like that on Fastly, for example.

[rstephenson2]

$0.035/GB sounds about an order of magnitude too high once you get to a large scale, were these clients doing small amounts of bandwidth?

On the other hand, $0.0021/GB is far on the cheaper end of the spectrum, who is it that offers something that low?

Agreed all around that the pricing is frustratingly opaque.

[throwaway2016a]

We're talking about AWS though and AWS if you do < 10TB is 0.085 per GB from CloudFront. So CloudFlare is still much cheaper in that case.

fly.io looks interesting, though, never heard of them.

[maxclark]

I can confirm these $s