[fspoettel]

A couple of reasons:

- The free CDN is basically unusable with my ISP Telekom Germany due to a long-running and well documented peering dispute. This is not necessarily an issue with Cloudflare itself, but means that I have to pay for the Pro plan for every domain if I want to have a functioning site in my home country. The $25 per domain / project add up.

- Cloudflare recently had repeated, long outages that took down my projects for hours at a time.

- Their database offering (D1) had some unpredictable latency spikes that I never managed to fully track down.

- As a European, I'm trying to minimize the money I spent on US cloud services and am actively looking for European alternatives.

[tpetry]

You don‘t have to get the Pro plan to solve the Deutsche Telekom issues. You can also use their Argo product for $5/month - but only makes sense if your egress costs wouldn‘t exceed the pro plans pricing.

[js4ever]

Pro plan without argo give you better peering on Cloudflare?

[tpetry]

The reverse. Argo gives better peering than any paid plan. Its the reason for the product‘s existence. They can use more costly peering that they couldn‘t use with their free egress model.

[fspoettel]

Thanks for the pointer, not doubting that is true. My egress is unfortunately too large for it to make financial sense.

However, at the time I did plenty of trace routes to confirm that the Pro plans peering is at least better than the Free plan for the Telekom problem. Free plan would route traffic to NYC and back, while Pro plan traffic terminates in Frankfurt.