Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous free tier?
76 comments
·January 15, 2025shubhamjain
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.
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/
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.
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).
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?
johntash
Did you move from cf to someone else, or are you still using them?
wiradikusuma
You should report that to them. Their CTO multiple times said this in HN.
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.
xd1936
The OP doesn't link to Cloudflare's (repeated) explanation about this exact topic.
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.
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.
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.
is_true
At which point do you think you get in the radar?
JohnMakin
As other commenters have mentioned, it is a bit of a bait and switch and not "truly" unlimited - but pretty much this is true for any XaaS that advertises "unlimited" anything. That said though, I still find cloudflare's free basic product incredibly good for the price. The proxy will handle a pretty good amount of load before you get any sales emails. I use some of their enterprise products and I'm extremely pleased, so it is a little hard to complain when I am getting great value out of it. I am however always wary of this not remaining the case forever. For what it is though, I can't really find many comparable products. It's sort of like datadog to me - yes, it's expensive, yes, their pricing can be a bit nebulous and feels bad at times, but the product is still extremely good for what I need it to do and until that changes I guess I'll just keep forking over dollars. That seems to be the way of things now.
blue_light_man
Top of the funnel.
nichochar
We're building our startup infra on cloudflare over the other major hyperscalers and it turned out to be an amazing decision...
Generous free tiers, pricing scales very competitively after that, and their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS.
I highly recommend this stack.
Strongbad536
you run compute workloads on there?
jgrahamc
Yes: https://developers.cloudflare.com/ Look at Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare Workers AI.
jgrahamc
Cool. What are you building?
IncreasePosts
srcbook.com (not OP, just trolling through their profile).
andrethegiant
Same here!
johnklos
This seems like little more than a sales pitch. For instance:
> Second, companies like Cloudflare benefit from a fast, secure internet. If the internet is fast and reliable, more people will want to use it.
The author doesn't seem to have anything to say with any more substance than this gem.
Shakahs
Because they own the CDN and most of the bandwidth is from peering, so it essentially costs them nothing. Netlify on the other hand has to pay per GB to AWS.
jsheard
Netlify manages to be wildly overpriced even by AWS standards, CloudFront starts at about $85/TB, which isn't cheap by any means, but that turns into $550/TB(!!) if you go through Netlify. They have some of the most obscene bandwidth pricing in the industry by a huge margin, and to add insult to injury they don't allow you to set a spending limit either.
hipadev23
because they’re an amazing piece of technology that also happens to be a state sponsored man-in-the-middle platform.
nicholasjarnold
I was assuming that it's a loss-leader sort of business strategy at play before reading your comment. Do you care to share any insights/references to support this claim?
hipadev23
Nah that’d be a national security crisis.
But the presence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM well over 10 years ago should be sufficient.
nicholasjarnold
Gotcha. Yeah, I mean all of these platforms are certainly juicy targets for room 641A [0] shenanigans. I just wondered if there had been some public leaks or something which we might not all be aware of yet.
ForHackernews
One half of the NSA's mission is defensive, dedicated to improving the security of US systems and infrastructure: https://www.nsa.gov/Cybersecurity/
gosub100
So the deep state is smart enough to take over the corporation and inject all this secret squirrel tech, but didn't think to cook the books to make it look like a marginally-profitable (but boring) business?
It reminds me of the counterargument to UFOs where they say "so the UFO flew here from 100 light-years away, through extreme cold, deep space, intense radiation, dodged space rocks, but as soon as it came into a lukewarm atmosphere with a modest gravity and tame weather, it crashed into a field in New Mexico?"
jjordan
What are some alternatives? Preferably the more open source the better.
Strongbad536
Idk if they're open source, but netlify was the company that I thought sort of made this feature free and easy to use. Github pages is also a free alternative.
mhitza
Someone was (incidentally?) ddos'ed on Netlify last year and was served a 104k bill. The fees were waved in the end, but the caveat remains on all these free services that you pay by bandwidth.
pc86
This is one of those things where the act of trying to evade state-level actors by definition puts you on their radar big time.
dingnuts
what is an "open source" network infrastructure provider?
ramon156
Cloudflare is mostly open-sourced, alternatives are more often than not closed-sourced
overstay8930
Alternatives to what? Five Eyes? Good luck with that.
HWR_14
China is happy to offer an alternative. It has pretty high costs, and I don't think it's worth it, but it exists.
null
fiatjaf
Honestly this is the most likely hypothesis, but would be nice to have some more evidence.
MarkuC
PRISM revealed secrets. It also revealed that some companies fought back as much as possible. It's also possible to design core tech so that even when forced to participate, you reveal as little or no information.
CloudFlare, PRISM, and Securing SSL Ciphers, 2013-06-12 Matthew Prince https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-prism-secure-ciphers/
ejcx
We're incredibly biased since several members of our team worked at Cloudflare, but we spend between $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
> 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.