Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?

368 comments

·January 15, 2025

shubhamjain

> Additionally, there's plenty of "Upgrade to Pro" buttons sprinkled about. It's the freemium model at work.

I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts. Note that, Matthew Prince, the CEO, had outlined a few reasons why they have such a generous free tier on an Stack Exchange answer[1]. I think the biggest reason is this:

> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.

Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at an incredible scale. I would actually be very interested in understanding how this vision came to be. Hope Matthew writes that book someday.

[1]: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685.

mdasen

I think there are a few other benefits (even if that was the main benefit/driving force behind the decision).

When you have low-paying (or zero-paying) customers, you need to make your system easy. When you're enterprise-only, you can pay for stuff like dedicated support reps. A company is paying you $1M+/year and you hire someone at $75,000 who is dedicated to a few clients. Anything that's confusing is just "Oh, put in a chat to Joe." It isn't the typical support experience: it's someone that knows you and your usage of the system. By contrast, Cloudflare had to make sure that its system was easy enough to use that free customers would be able to easily (cheaply) make sense of it. Even if you're going to give enterprise customers white-glove service, it's always nice for them when systems are easy and pleasant to use.

When you're carrying so much free traffic, you have to be efficient. It pushes you to actually make systems that can handle scale and diverse situations without just throwing money at the problem. It's easy for companies to get bloated/lazy when they're fat off enterprise contracts - and that isn't a good recipe for long-term success.

Finally, it's a good way to get mindshare. I used Cloudflare for years just proxying my personal blog that got very little traffic. When my employer was thinking about switching CDNs, myself and others who had used Cloudflare personally kinda pushed the "we should really be looking at Cloudflare." Free customers may never give you a dollar - but they might know someone or work for someone who will give you millions. Software engineers love things that they can use for free and that has often paid dividends for companies behind those free things.

nindalf

I built my website on Cloudflare Pages and ended up using basically their entire suite of tools - Pages, D1, Analytics, Rules, Functions. The DX was pretty good because all of these features worked well together.

Cloudflare offered all of this for free because it gets them positive mentions (like the one you’re reading right now) and they’re educating a bunch of developers on their entire product portfolio. And what does it cost to host my blog that 1000-2000 views a month? Literally nothing.

mentalgear

This approach is good as long as the tech stack is open source and portable to other platforms. Otherwise, no matter how good a company/CEO seems ATM, you are ultimately at their mercy if they decide to raise prices significantly.

By using an open, interoperable tech stack, you maintain the freedom to switch to another cloud provider at will.

This shared fluid power also creates a compelling reason for cloud providers to remain honest and competitive in their dealings with customers.

Moru

I have been bitten many times by this usage of free stuff that suddenly starts to cost money so it took a while before I dared to use cloudflare. Have been using it for a few years now without any surprise bills so still happy. Hope I didn't jinx it now. :-)

ljm

I feel like there might be an additional motivation too, which is that this investment in a better internet (free SSL for everyone before LetsEncrypt came around, generous free tiers for users, etc. etc.) means that Cloudflare builds a reputation of being a steward of the ecosystem while also benefitting indirectly from wider adoption of good, secure practices.

In some ways it's analogous to investing in your local community and arguably paying tax: it's rare that you would directly and personally benefit from this, but if the environment you live in improves from it, crime is reduced, more to do, etc. then you can enjoy a better quality of life.

ipaddr

Have they made a better internet? Many would say that made it worse.

bentcorner

Reminds me of the School -> Pro pipeline where companies sell cheaply or even give away their software to learning institutions so that students who go pro are familiar with their tools and then later recommend it for their work.

DaiPlusPlus

That’s absolutely true for things like MS Office and Adobe - but it also works in the other direction: I’m sure making kids use Java for AP computer-science or for undergrad contributed to its uncool status today.

Brian_K_White

Autocad 10-12 back in college. Cost thousands of dollars in 80s/90s dollars, Not officially allowed to copy, but in reality effortless to copy and run at home for free.

There were other products aiming to be just as good at the same time that were actually protected with dongles and such.

The one that everyone could run at home is the one that took over the world.

fheisler

This is exactly our thinking with authentik (open source IdP), and it's played out in practice so far. Enterprise sales conversations are so much easier when they start with "we all use you in our homelabs already." We're much more focused on giving those individual users a positive early experience (in hopes that some small percentage will really pay off down the road) than in extracting a few dollars from each of them.

CWuestefeld

I had this exact conversation with a Cloudflare rep a year or two ago, after I told her how I user their free DNS service. She said, "that free service was the best thing we ever did". And we wound up buying their bot management and DDOS services.

jgrahamc

I went back and reread that reply by Matthew. Essentially, nothing has changed; the free customers are very important to us for all the reasons that he outlined. See also this blog post on us and free customers from 2024: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

bobnamob

^ CTO of Cloudflare for reference

ndiddy

> I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts.

Cloudflare's enterprise customer acquisition strategy seems to be offering free or extremely cheap flat-rate plans with "no limits", then when a customer gets a sizeable amount of traffic they will try to sell them an enterprise plan and cut them off if they don't buy (see https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...). IMO this is pretty shrewd, as it means that companies can't do real price comparisons between Cloudflare and other CDNs until they already have all their infrastructure plugged into Cloudflare.

ganoushoreilly

That particular story / case had a lot more context to it that we weren't given. I wouldn't be ready to place any kind of merit on it without hearing more. I also think given the OP's industry it's likely there were issues with IP reputation. Could it have been handled differently? Probably. In this case I think it would have been smarter to just part ways upfront and let the client know it's not going to work out. I suspect the contract was designed to say.. we don't see the value in this relationship.. but at this price we'll make it work type deal. I don't think that's the right way to go, but I hardly believe this is how they operate.

I've used their free -> enterprise services in multiple companies and clients. Haven't had a single bad experience with them yet. Always helpful, if a bit delayed at times.

ndiddy

It doesn't seem like Cloudflare has any problems with online gambling, especially since the first email the author got from Cloudflare came from someone in their "Gaming & iGaming" division. There's people in this thread in other industries who have had similar experiences with them.

IMO the biggest problems are how Cloudflare kept inventing excuses like "issues with account settings" to get the customer on the phone with their sales team, and the mixing of "trust and safety" with sales (like deleting their account for ToS violations after the CEO mentioned talking to a competing CDN).

vasco

Yep, and if you contact their sales directly because you've been bitten before and tell them your traffic they will be happy to tell you that yes, other than a short trial you have to pay them for huge bandwidth from month one. It's actually surprising to me people would believe it's fully free. Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt immediately.

jgrahamc

Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt immediately.

Cloudflare's free tier specifically excludes video. See https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...:

Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business) Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.

pc86

I haven't heard about this in particular but based entirely on your depiction here it sounds more like fraud to me.

If I was paying a flat rate for a no limit plan, that company tried to sell me an Enterprise plan which I declined, then they cut me off, we'd be in court as soon as the clerk would schedule it.

jamespo

If you were rotating IPs against the TOS I don't think you'd have a leg to stand on

NicoJuicy

I remember this story and it missed the entire point.

The customer ( a casino) was using dubious actions in different countries which impacted Cloudflare's IP trust. Tldr: Cloudflare didn't want an IP ban in their IP's due to government regulation.

The fix was to bring their own IP which is an Enterprise feature, as they weren't allowed to use Cloudflare's IPs anymore.

AnthonyMouse

I'm not really sure how this works.

Suppose you have paying customers and for that you need X amount of bandwidth. If you add a bunch of free customers then you need X + Y bandwidth. But the price of X + Y is never going to be lower than the price of X, is it? So even if the unit cost is lower, the total cost is still higher and you haven't produced any additional revenue in exchange, so how can this produce any net profit?

bauruine

If you send 10Gbit/s to an ISP you have to pay for transit to reach it. But if you send 100Gbit/s+ the ISP suddenly is willing to not only peer for free with you but may even host the servers for you in their data center for free. [0][1][2] So yes being bigger can absolutely save you costs.

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/

[1]: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

[2]: https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en

tomnipotent

Don't forget about the Bandwidth Alliance, which is agreements for free or cheap egress between peers.

https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

YetAnotherNick

Can't you just send random generated packets. Or by requesting content from other hosting provider with free or cheap egress. Or sending to another hosting provider.

Ugohcet

The thing with ISPs is the small guys are more likely to have to pay, and the smaller you are the more likely you are to pay more.

If you are a Tier 1 ISP, everyone is willing to pay you to carry their traffic and other Tier 1s just make peering agreements with you.

If you're johnscheapvps.com, you're likely to pay all your upstream ISPs for your traffic. If you're GCP or, say, digitalocean.com, everyone would love to be paying you to get faster access to all the sites hosted on your platform (and because paying you is probably going to be cheaper than their regular upstream)

laverya

Imagine you're an ISP. If your customer has slow bandwidth to some random website, they will blame the website. If they have a slow connection to YouTube, they will blame you.

So YouTube gets more favorable terms on transit bandwidth than the random site does.

mugsie

it may be, especially if the ISP in question just does direct peering with you, your unit cost can drop to ~ $0/MB, and you stop paying Cogent/Verizion/HE unit cost for facilitating the connection from you to the ISP.

Works for the ISP too, one off cost for them to drop there side of the bill down

chippiewill

The point is that that you get your paid offering down to a lower price point because you have the volume to get the cheaper peering deals. Because your paid offering is cheap you get even more volume from paying customers which offsets the loss you made.

DrBenCarson

And this works IME

I use Cloudflare for hobby projects 90% of the time because it’s free. That dramatically increases the likelihood I advocate for their offerings in the enterprise

parkerproject

[dead]

estsauver

Cloudflare generally seems to have a really smart strategy team. There's a really excellent Stratechery article about Cloudflare's strategy team more generally:

(Stratechery is down now, but the web archive is up.) https://web.archive.org/web/20250108182845/https://strateche...

https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/

crowcroft

It's a very elegant business strategy because you have one clear focus (handle loads of bandwidth), but it can be expressed in so many ways (DNS/Caching, object storage, video delivery/streaming, static site hosting).

uncertainrhymes

I've always wondered if there is an accounting benefit for them. Can the free tier be charged as 'marketing'? No idea how you would internally break up the costs, but it could make your margins look better.

neya

It's not really free. One day, you get a call from their sales team saying "you're straining our network". I kid you not. We were on a business plan and still got this. When we met them in person, we were asked to upgrade to a $2000+ per month plan. From a $200/mo plan. That's a 10x increase. I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay. We refused. That really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Today, I refuse to recommend any client or startup to them because of this extremely unethical practice. All around, I'm not sure they deserve so much positive press/attention, especially after screwing some of their own employees (one even got super famous live streaming the firing).

danpalmer

We had a terrible sales experience with Cloudflare at my last place. They would not budge on the $200 a month quote, and we knew that was BS because the next closest quote we had was $3000 or something. Eventually, like the fourth try, we said, in writing, “just to be clear, for exactly $200, a month we will get XYZ bandwidth”, and of course they said “ohhh well actually maybe it’ll be $8000”.

We had discussed our requirements, our scale, our product with the sales team multiple times but it was only when we wrote down something that we could potentially have used in court that they finally acknowledged their pricing was actually nearly two orders of magnitude higher.

gruez

>I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay.

You seem to be pretty cagey about what your usage actually was, and whether it was indeed "straining their network". Were you using more resources/bandwidth than a typical customer would? Most ToS contains clauses that allows the vendor to unilaterally cut customers off if they're an excessive burden, even if there aren't explicit quotas, or are explicitly "unlimited". ISPs don't let you saturate your 1Gbit connection 24 hours a day, even on "unlimited" plans, but I wouldn't call it a "scam" if they told you to upgrade to an enterprise plan.

vvillena

Well, Cloudflare seems pretty cagey about what their prices are, given they don't reveal them to clients until they are completely tied in.

neya

This is for a normal news website, no gambling, no offensive content. Just regular news. Their business plan explicitly mentioned "unlimited bandwidth" at the time of signing up. I clearly remember reading every bit of their TOS to find any gotchas but there were none.

If you claim you provide unlimited bandwidth, then don't call me tell me I'm straining your network.

Sammi

By the tone of your comment it does sound like they give you a lot before asking you to pay more.

I still really would like to hear a byte amount. How many bytes are you pushing per month?

I don't believe anything is ever free, and everyone promising "unlimited" will still have a point where you are just costing them too much. CF don't want to say the byte number themselves. Could someone please say the byte number. Someone?

bogwog

I've seen enough stories exactly like this from other CF customers to believe it.

gruez

I've seen enough stories exactly like this, where it turned out such usage is unusual and a move to a higher priced plan was justified (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482505, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640016, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336515), that I find it suspicious whenever people act surprised and outraged at cloudflare upselling them, but are cagey about what exactly their site's doing.

sergiotapia

This "straining the network" is the "unlimited pto" of b2b saas. It's all bullshit. Nebulous and you don't really know what you're getting into until you're too locked in and they squeeze you. Don't do business with companies like this if you can avoid it. It's the Datadog model of we'll charge you whatever and make it extremely complicated for you to understand why you're being billed $x this month.

Spivak

Word of advice, if you have unlimited PTO and you've never gotten called into a meeting to tell you you're taking too much you're not taking full advantage. It's probably higher than you think. I've gotten to normal onsie-twosie days off plus 8 full weeks before I got called in.

That was a great year.

GuB-42

I understand unlimited PTO as no lower limit, as in, there is no limit on how few PTO days you can take.

If you have an actual number, the idea is that you must take them, or at least, you get paid extra if you don't.

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rovr138

straining is also ambiguous and disingenuous.

if we believe the plan was $200 and the upgrade was to a $2,000 plan.. there's no way a $2,000 user would be "straining" Cloudflare's network.

We spend more than that. If we are putting a strain on Cloudflare, they're not at the scale we think they're at.

gruez

Seems like you don't really have any issue with the underlying business decision (ie. pushing a high usage customer to a higher tier plan) and are only upset about the wording the salesperson used. All the points you've made applies to ISPs as well. Most neighborhoods are probably provisioned well enough that a single customer saturating their 1gbit connection isn't going to bring the network down to its knees, but that doesn't mean ISPs aren't justified in pushing such customers to a higher tier offering (eg. dedicated circuit).

dubcanada

To be honest, sales people are sales people. Their job is to sell you on packages, and they will generally do anything to get you to upgrade.

It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service. They asked you and gave you a "canned" reason.

If you don't mind me asking you had a $200 a month plan, and changed to another provider. Did the plan price go up or down?

threatofrain

If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer.

Except now there isn’t a clear formalization on how much you were expecting to pay or how much runway or patience CF has left for you.

maccard

> If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer.

I've had a call from Cloudflare at my previous job, and it wasn't a "you're about to be fired" it was an attempted upsell.

bradgessler

Sales people work within the policies & frameworks set by a sales organizations whose goals and strategies are set by said organizations leadership team.

This isn't a random sales person gone rouge—its a matter of how Cloudflare chooses to do business with and treat their customers.

The problem with this approach for customers is that it makes there costs entirely unpredictable. What's the stop them from increasing prices from $2,000 on the enterprise plan to $20,000 on the enterprise plus plan?

nijave

Very true. I think it was Snowflake we worked with recently where the sales rep said they don't get commission (I assume they have other incentives).

Aggressive commission structures, sales targets, and little oversights have visible impacts on how the sales team operate.

Compare to cloud providers like AWS where you certainly get "reminded" constantly about all the integrated services and features but much less so harassed and threatened into closing deals.

Spivak

If you're not big enough to get an actual contract signed by your legal teams then nothing. That's just how it is, not unique to CF.

nextaccountic

> It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service

They routinely do exactly this

noname120

And it's not only threats, they actually enforce them. Here is an example, but there are many more: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...

grapesodaaaaa

I actually recommend AWS because of this. Sure, it’s AWS with all the warts, but at least they bend over backwards to maintain compatibility (at least compared to GCP), and have sustainable billing practices.

Free is free until it’s not. When Cloudflare becomes the new Akamai and needs profits, guess who will get squeezed. If you’ve built your app around their vendor specific stuff like Cloudflare functions, that can be bad news.

internetter

> If you’ve built your app around their vendor specific stuff like Cloudflare functions, that can be bad news.

There's nothing that "special" about Cloudflare Workers, its mostly "just" a WinterCG runtime. Where you'd encounter problems is if you used the provided interfaces for other adjacent Cloudflare products, like R2, D1, KV, Queues, ect. So what you do is commit a hour of engineering time to make wrapper functions for these APIs. If you're feeling extra spicy, commit another hour of engineering time to make parallel implementations for another service provider. If you allow your tech stack to become deeply intertwined with a 3rd party service provider, thats on you.

grapesodaaaaa

Yeah, I guess that’s what I really meant.

Also at face value, it may seem like “an hour of engineering time,” but I think cloud vendor lock in is real unless you try very hard to only use abstract constructs.

specialp

This is a growing pattern in hosting like Netlify and headless CMSs like Sanity. Their free model is "generous" and then if you go production and start to have overages you get billed exorbitantly for bandwidth and API requests. It is essentially a trap. Once you hit those limits you have very little negotiating power when you hit the "call us for pricing" level and you get outrageous quotes. It costs them very little to run these services so if they can net some minnows that become whales, that is almost pure profit.

tootie

It's the double-edged sword of both free plans and "transparent pricing". If you just click "buy" and enter your CC info you're subject to their somewhat arbitrary terms of service. Service is cheap and reliable so you don't ask questions. But they can just boot you and there's very little recourse. It's why most big companies want a signed contract that's binding and comes with some kind of mandatory dispute resolution or penalties for non-compliance.

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wiradikusuma

You should report that to them. Their CTO multiple times said this in HN.

throitallaway

I'm not a fan of Cloudflare's enterprise pricing model. It seems like they'll charge you whatever they'd like to when renewal time comes around, and will play with the numbers to ensure you stay around whatever total they'd like to see. They charge for each protected domain, in addition to sane metrics like bandwidth utilization and number of requests. Charging thousands per protected domain per year is scummy. Maybe I'm just too used to AWS/GCloud/et al. pricing that actually bills me on utilization rather than arbitrary metrics.

johntash

Did you move from cf to someone else, or are you still using them?

wahnfrieden

I like Bunny because it’s prepaid

simonw

I heard a great theory about this recently.

The hardest part of onboarding a new customer to Cloudflare is the bit where you need to switch over to having them manage DNS for you.

If you're under a DoS attack or similar, waiting for DNS changes to propagate is the last thing you want to have to care about!

Cloudflare's generous free tier is an amazing way of getting that funnel started: anyone who signs up for the free tier has already configured everything that matters, which means when they DO consider becoming a paying customer the friction in doing so is tiny.

irunmyownemail

Not being able to use DNS I prefer, is why I've never hosted anything with Cloudflare.

xd1936

The OP doesn't link to Cloudflare's (repeated) explanation about this exact topic.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

parineum

I suspect they also greatly benefit from developers using them for hobbies and suggesting that their workplace use them in turn. Though, that's much harder to track.

knallfrosch

It's not hard to confirm, since the CEO posted this very reason 9 years ago. It's not exactly hidden on.. StackExchange, answering the very question:

"How can CloudFlare offer a free CDN with unlimited bandwidth?"

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/88659/how-can...

MattSayar

Narciss

This ^

i_have_an_idea

The reason it's free and with unlimited bandwidth is that it's not.

Unless you stay very small, you'll eventually get on the radar of the sales team and you'll realize the service is neither unlimited nor free. In fact, you'll likely have to look at a 5 or 6-figure contract to remain on the service.

ignoramous

(n = 1 & all) A project I co-develop pushed 30TB to 60TB per month on Cloudflare Workers in the past (for months on end) for $0. No one called us to sign 6 figure contracts.

Dylan16807

Workers are a very different product so I'm not too surprised by that. The main workers payment model is entirely concerned with CPU use and you must be minimizing that.

i_have_an_idea

wait

creeble

Do you have a counter example, or is this just your assumption?

spand

I can second this. Their sales people have such poor behaviour that I am considering moving away simply on principle. There is nothing predictable about being on an enterprise contract and they will hit you with bullshit overage charges like using too many dns requests (wtf??) all of a sudden to force you onto a much larger contract. On the 28th of December no less ! We have used them for a very long time but I am having very big doubts about how much we can use them in the future even though their products are great.

neonsunset

https://bunny.net/pricing/ <3

(disclaimer: I'm an employee but no commission is earned for this, we just work hard, opinions on HN otherwise don't reflect that of my employer)

wirelesspotat

Big +1 for Bunny.net - I moved my current company to Bunny and it's been excellent. Super fast (for our PoPs at least), reasonable pricing, love the image optimizer & edge rules (especially for solving header issues when embedding documents), has a Terraform provider, and I was able to set most of it up in a day. Was a night and day difference from GCP's Cloud CDN

christophilus

We use Bunny, and it’s been solid and super inexpensive. None of my production issues have ever been due to Bunny.

alana314

The CSS on the site isn't loading properly for me FYI on chrome, it looks insane

delduca

+1 to Bunny

is_true

At which point do you think you get in the radar?

ensignavenger

At the point where the sales team has already hit all the targets that are bigger than you.

ejcx

We're incredibly biased since several members of our team worked at Cloudflare, but we spend ~$20 a month on Cloudflare for our startup and it is fantastic.

- Marketing videos on stream

- Pages for multiple nextjs sites

- DNS + Domain Reg

- cloudflared / tunnels for local dev

- zaraz tag manager

- Page rules / redirect rules for vanity redirects we want to do.

The list gets longer every day and the amount of problems we can solve quickly is amazing. The value to money is unmatched