It is amazing, for the base concept of the Internet being a decentralized network to survive outages, how much centralization has occurred. I use a separate registrar (porkbun in my case), with that thought in mind.
Thats the main reason I don't register through CloudFlare too. I've heard lots of comments like the parent "its good enough". But I don't want to centralize my domain and my CDN. A little separation is nice. So I register elsewhere and use CloudFlare proxies.
CloudFlare still feels "too good to be true" to me. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. They offer way too much for free. I'm taking advantage of the free tier CDN for now, since it is overly generous. But I keep thinking one day they are going to pull the rug out from under us (like we've seen with so many tech companies before) and a lot of devs will feel trapped with CloudFlare. So that is why I mostly keep my domain registrations away from them. The savings are honestly minimal in my experience for registrations.
It's like having a prenup. If they sour the relationship and I want a divorce, it's easy to just point my domains elsewhere and move on quickly and effortlessly.
Cloudflare is post IPO, no more VC pressure in that way, and their founders have pretty strong control of the board.
I suppose the true test will be when wall street investors try to squeeze cloudflare, but I believe the founders have majority control of the company anyway, re: Meta & Zuckerburg, they could rightly tell them to F off.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I think if Cloudflare wanted to squeeze customers, they could have done so already.
Also, Cloudflare Enterprise pricing more than makes up for their free tiers, it does jump in cost significantly from their highest paid plan -> enterprise.
Also, their compute is priced on the mid-high end (not highest, certainly, its more high for medium or low high, if you will). KV storage and durable objects aren't the cheapest in their class either. Their margins on these services alone I imagine are lucrative.
I don't think Cloudflare is overvalued or particularly overpriced, but they aren't basement cheap either.
re: CDN. At cloudflares maturity and scale, their CDN is incredibly cheap to run and their generous free tier reflects this. Sending cached files around the world isn't as expensive as it used to be.
CloudFlare still feels "too good to be true" to me. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. They offer way too much for free. I'm taking advantage of the free tier CDN for now, since it is overly generous. But I keep thinking one day they are going to pull the rug out from under us (like we've seen with so many tech companies before) and a lot of devs will feel trapped with CloudFlare. So that is why I mostly keep my domain registrations away from them. The savings are honestly minimal in my experience for registrations.
It's like having a prenup. If they sour the relationship and I want a divorce, it's easy to just point my domains elsewhere and move on quickly and effortlessly.