[PaywallBuster]

it's not about the website content, it's about the content served from Cloudflare network.

Your website can be anything you want, but if CF bandwidth usage gonna be 99% for videos, you're not using it to serve the website, you're distributing content.

Which is not the use case they're servicing (with their "CDN" service)

They have a new service for that: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/

Which may be expensive too or difficult to compare (they bill per minute/instead of data)

For huge volumes, it's certainly better to find "specialized" providers or budget options like bunny.net

[slownews45]

Umm, this is what is such a gimmick about these "free" services.

I run a video website on AWS, no one cares what I am doing, they charge me and done. I distribute software updates, no one complains, they charge me and done.

I run a video website on cloudflare, they say, oh, you are not running a website, you are distributing content, that's against the rules. Similarly if I host my software, my software updates, my management layer with firmware update service etc. Heads ups, when I visit these sites, for most normal people I am visiting a website.

Do folks not realize when they keep on repeating that egress is "free" on cloudflare that is a total lie? Hello, it's not free. You will get a call and they will squeeze you.

The streaming product is useful finally because we have at least a rough idea of price. Youtube avg video is 700MB/hr or so (mobile video is huge these days). That get's us to about 9 cents per GB.

Interestingly, this was I think the egress pricing they had for workers back when they were public about it.

AWS is 5 to 9 cents as well depending on usage so same range.

AWS Cloudfront is 2 cents to 9 cents depending on usage.

OK, so we are within the normal range of things now with egress pricing.

In my own experience with this type of player, you still get the call if you optimize for their pricing (ie, you run your 4K content through them, and your other content via another platform) because despite their claims bandwidth is "free" they are actually losing money on it, and if you use enough of this "free" stuff their marketing budget can't handle it and they just shut you down.

It's just not worth dealing with.

You'll know Cloudflare has a competitive CDN offering when they are willing to give you the pricing publicly of providing a CDN service that can handle any type of content. That is the proof point.

Cloudflare does have Argo which I think runs in that 5 to 9 cent range again per GB.

Back to the claim that AWS has hidden pricing (especially relative to cloudflare). I still find that ridiculous. Cloudlfare seems to be a heavily marketing based org with very hidden pricing (everything is call for a quote). Does anyone know what % of expense cloudflare has in marketing / selling? I'd imagine pretty damn high.

[judge2020]

Egress pricing is free for certain content. It's not free for all content. If i'm a fast food joint and offer free meals to veterans, I can do that, even if some customers complain that i'm not running a soup kitchen where everyone eats free.

Cloudflare can offer free bandwidth to a whole host of sites and still have "a competitive CDN offering" without giving away free video hosting, arguably one of the most expensive use-cases to support.

[slownews45]

Sure. Cloudflare can give away free services as a marketing effort. AWS gives away 1TB/month of cloudfront bandwidth, 1 million lambda calls per month, 1 million SNS notification per month, 25GB of DynamoDB capacity, 1 million Simple Queue queries per month and plenty more. So does google.

But what, again, is the pricing of cloudflare's "competitive CDN offering"? That seriously all I am asking for.

If you are going to go on about pricing (cloudflare does) have the courtesy to list yours publicly and don't have gag orders in your agreements.

The context of all of this is Amazon supposedly obfuscating their pricing to waste budgets. With cloudflare, you can't even FIND their pricing and will need to talk with a salesperson.

Anyways, for those stumbling around with this, minimum I've heard cloudflare doing is $24K per year on their paid stuff, and then they added Argo at around 10 cents per GB in the pay as you go offerings. Cloudfront is 2 to 9 cents per GB, google 2 to 10, fastly is around 8 to 12 cents, keycdn 4 cents etc. Not claiming AWS or Google are the cheapest, but pricing is pretty darn upfront.

Also have heard of folks getting busted by cloudflare if too many folks in asia/non-USA use the service, this seems far fetched, but AWS does charge differently by geo area so not sure if cloudflare has some rules like that tucked away.

[kanwisher]

You don't have to talk to a sales person for cloudflare pricing, its directly on the homepage of cloudflare stream. For everything non video, I have paid exactly $0 egress for some large sites over the last few years.

[PaywallBuster]

I think it comes from Cloudflare selling a "CDN" but instead of a "dumb" set of servers you can distribute content globally for a certain price you're actually getting a "smart" network with all kinds of services and features.

But it works fine for 95% of customers :)

If you're moving volumes of course you should look into detail and consider the most adequate option.