[broken-kebab]

It's impossible to generalize over free vs paid in regard to predictability. E.g. a provider I paid for simply disappeared once when I was quite busy while my old free gmail still works. Realistically CF's free tier is more predictable than many paid options on market.

[Kye]

My threat model here focuses on what the provider gets out of the free tier. Cloudflare gets a broad view into activity on the internet for building the models they use for their paid offerings. Free Gmail puts people on a path in to Google's ecosystem with basically zero marginal cost.