[SXX]

Free tier that let you hide your server IPs, cheap domain registry (with no margin) and even some also tunnels for zero trust. Like I used them for a lot of personal and tbh even commercial projects for years paying them $0. Also they have bandidth alliance with Backblaze so you can serve 100s of TBs for free.

So there a lot of convinience and free stuff. It's quite obviously that when I had commercial customers where for whatever reason free tier wasn't anough I juse used them as well. Why not? There are horror stories about their corporate pricing, but for smaller company paying $20-200 for CDN is no brainer.

Also huge massive advantage of CloudFlare is that majority of their services are not metered so it's hard to wake up to $100,000 bill like it can happen with AWS and almost any other CDN provider.

I still believe this kind of centralized MiTM is bad for us all, but honestly I'd rather it be CloudFlare than Amazon, Microsoft or some other "evil corp".

[vvpan]

Thanks for the thorough write-up. I am also conflicted that somebody has so much power in the market but at least they are not AWS/GCP.