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.
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.
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.
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.