The free offerings are not a loss-leader in the conventional sense of anticipating future upsell. They are a traffic generator used to drive up Cloudflare’s leverage when negotiating peering with carriers & service providers, in order to drive down the marginal cost of bandwidth for Cloudflare’s actual product, the enterprise DDoS protection, with the criticality of traffic interchange expenses being evident in the vehemence with which Cloudflare discuss peering matters, such as via the astroturf’d “bandwidth alliance” grouping they sponsor.

In which vein, anyone familiar with The Peering Playbook will recognise the kind of annoying hardball Prince thinks he is playing, but I doubt it works on nation states.