[Comevius]

The rest of the industry haven't even started figuring out what Cloudflare Pages Functions + Durable Objects can do. Workers can also send emails for free, and soon you will be able to process them as well with Email Workers. Cloudflare also doesn't charge you for egress either.

[strix_varius]

> The rest of the industry haven't even started figuring out what Cloudflare Pages Functions + Durable Objects can do

I was very excited when both of these technologies were first announced (years ago).

I tried them, immediately, then (during the initial beta). They were clunky, half-baked, and don't even get me started on the DX of developing against them. Literally missing from cloudflare's own CLI - the official docs described how to manually deploy via CURLing endpoints. It felt like manually FTPing files onto a server, like in the 90s.

Ok fine, this is an early beta, let's let this bake longer.

So a few months ago, I started a new greenfield project and once again decided to give Functions + Durable Objects a shot... and was astounded to find the exact same half-baked experience, where different "beta" versions of the CLI had to be installed in order to support the different endpoints, and these were in fact mutually-exclusive.

Cloudflare has some cool ideas, but they seem to like rolling out 70% of a cool idea and then moving into the next shiny thing without ever making the first thing actually polished and reliable. After wasting many hours with Cloudflare's DX, I decided to never waste more time with them as a development platform (vs an optimization layer / CDN / etc).

[matthews2]

We just don't want to support MiTMFlare with our traffic and money.

[sophacles]

I'm always curious how you folks would CDN without SSL termination. Or you know, host anywhere but your own gear if MiTM was a real concern.

[anderspitman]

There's a huge amount of websites that don't need a CDN (my blog has frontpaged multiple times without one). And for many (all?) of the rest you'd be fine with 3-5 regions. CDNs increase latency for low-traffic sites.

[rs_rs_rs_rs_rs]

Cloudflare reports 50% quarter growth year over year, it sounds to me you're in a minuscule minority.

[matthews2]

Yes, let's simplify the Internet, being decentralised is such a crutch! We should all just connect directly to Cloudflare.

[schwartzworld]

Getting angry at people for using centralized solutions is not a way to win people over to your cause, and even many people who would prefer decentralized solutions are going to pick the easy route sometimes. If you're developing a web app, maybe you want to spend your time writing app code. People only have so much time in a day.

[rs_rs_rs_rs_rs]

You go ahead and play "being decentralised" with your buddies while people in the real world just mind their own business doing whatever they need to do using the current right tool for the job(in this case Cloudflare being the tool).

[dzikimarian]

People in the real world, who just cheerfully do business, with zero thought of impact or consequences of their actions beyond next paycheck, have put us in this awesome economic situation, we all know and enjoy.

Surely blindly pushing, yet another corporation into position, where they can lobby virtually anything, is awesome idea. (Nothing against folks from cloudflare. They seem all right, but they will get acquired and/or change leadership at some point).

[anderspitman]

In nature, a lack of genetic diversity in a species isn't typically much of a problem until there's an extinction event, and then it can be a big problem.

You might not feel the downsides of having a huge percentage of the internet going through a single provider until it's too late to change it.

I actually quite like Cloudflare, and I don't think they're purposely doing anything nefarious (just following incentives like everyone), but I think caution is warranted.

[quickthrower2]

At least it is not Microsoft, Google or Meta providing the monopoly! For now…

[blueflow]

That the majority does it does not mean its a good thing.

[rs_rs_rs_rs_rs]

It absolutely is, Cloudflare offers great services and they deserve it!

[anderspitman]

I think parent meant as a general principle following the masses isn't always the best idea.

[Comevius]

This should help you then. 200 square feet, only $11.39.

https://www.amazon.com/Reynolds-Wrap-Aluminum-Foil-Square/dp...

[quickthrower2]

Weary of free as in beer. Often it is better to pay, for a situation where you are the actual customer.

[Comevius]

They made emails and egress free because there is a lot of price gouging going on in the industry that stops people from starting businesses.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

Identity as service is another category that's egregiously priced, and it's usually priced based on monthly active users too, which is the worst. It would be great to see Cloudflare disrupting that one as well.

[kkielhofner]

This. At this point in everything being "cloud native" fewer and fewer people and orgs have any experience building internet networks - buying transit (circuits), peering, etc.

For players at Cloudflare, AWS, GCP, etc scale it's essentially free. The fact that many of them (other than Cloudflare) charge $0.08/GB or whatever for egress and that's just accepted because people think "that's what it costs" is wild to me.

My personal conspiracy theory of sorts is that many compute, storage, etc products from big cloud providers are essentially priced as loss leaders because while the average dev has some idea of what a GB of storage, GHz CPU, etc costs (because they priced a laptop) they have no idea how bandwidth and connectivity is priced at this level and cloud providers capitalize on that (somewhat understandable) ignorance.

[quickthrower2]

Wouldn't surprise me if it were in Freakonomics, but there is always a weird "charging point" for things based on old expectations that subsidies the enterprise.

Like the old 50c/m mobile phone calls, the 10c SMS messages, then when they were free, charging for international SMS and calls, now charging for data. It is the "whales" who spend a lot of money on mobile games. 1% fee for looking after your money, Etc.

I wonder what AWS will do if they have to make egress cheap! What is the next thing they can charge for that is actually cheap but people are happy to pay for.

[donmcronald]

I mostly agree.

> Workers can also send emails for free, and soon you will be able to process them as well with Email Workers.

There's got to be some limitations to that and I don't like it when they're not well defined. Looking at the MailChannels pricing, it looks like it's roughly 40x more expensive than AWS SES on the low end and 4x on the biggest plan before negotiating a custom deal.

I can send 500k emails and have a dedicated IP on SES for the same cost as 40k emails from MailChannels. Since their big value add seems to be scanning emails to prevent spam from user generated content, I just don't see it if that's not functionality you need because it's all wasted resources / unnecessary cost in those cases.

I assume there's a point where it's no longer free and I'm guessing the cost once you get there will be high.

Plus, am I sharing IPs with people who are sending such low-quality mail it requires outbound spam filtering? That seems like a huge negative on the deliverability side of things.

[Comevius]

MailChannels is the service other services use, it's the de facto leader in combating spam. They are mostly meant to be used by high-volume hosted email services.

They are very good at detecting abuse. The leading cause of email deliverability problems is not advertisement, it's servers being hijacked by malicious actors.

[jgrahamc]

I agree.