Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will (2016)

I'm a big fan of Cloudflare and love how they've been improving their interfaces recently. I run a few sites that get 30k uniques a day and it amazes me that I can run them entirely for free - although I now choose to pay $5/month. Their services play very nicely with agents using wrangler and their domains service is top notch. At one point I was a bit netlify proponent but they banned one of my sites without even telling me for an unsubstantiated trademark complaint. Also love that they run 1.1.1.1.

I love cloudflare, seriously. Not sure what it is about the brand, but their products feel delightful, they feel like an honest business, they have great free tiers, their tech is “cool” and they seem to innovate a lot (I.e the recent AI blocking program etc). Just moved all my domains over from Whois.com (who on the other hand seem sneaky, don’t have auto renewals and slam you with an 80$ restoration fine for domains you forget to renew, and charge extra for basic security that should be free). Couldn’t be happier and wish cloudflare all the best!!

Look, this is a great business strategy.

The first point is data for a reason - the amount of traffic they see enables them to train models with capabilities beyond what the competition can do.

With free tiers it's harder for competition to break into market as they'll need to convince customers that they are getting more for the money than Cloudflare offers for free. Then see point one about data.

Sadly, this creates a choke point for the internet. When Cloudflare is down, "nothing" works. This used to be a problem, but if you're big enough, it's treated like a weather event. See AWS us-east-1 outages, I doubt anyone was compensated for the outage.

So yeah, Cloudflare has a great position.

What worries me is that AI data endpoint they're crafting. I don't think it's good idea that anyone has a hold of that much data.

Could we add (2016) to be title?

Just like Vercel and Render, thus many folks will get started there instead of having to deal with giving a credit card to the usual hyperscalers.

We have done prototypes of distributed systems based on SaaS products with such kind of accounts, and when proven to work, it is much easier to get the buy-in for the credit card, than starting with asking for money first delivery later.

Most people have forgotten just how cheap bandwidth is. Too much AWS lead cloud pricing propaganda brain rot. Without the high prices, your big clouds won't be able to afford 6-7 figs of engineering salary.

If you have questions about bandwidth pricing, just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads. They are not YouTube scale and most barely last a year before they have to come back with a new domain (because of deplatforming, not because they ran out of money).

A terabyte of bandwidth is maybe worth a dollar at scale (amortized globally, some places are more expensive than others i.e. Africa, certain parts of Asia). Yet the managed clouds gouge customers like there's no tomorrow.

> In 2015, our employment acceptance rate was 1.6% ...

What does that mean? That 1.6% of their offers were accepted by candidates? If so doesn't seem very high...

It isn’t just free. It’s effectively anonymous.

Most hosting (eg AWS) requires you to say who you are, provide a lot of ID. I think some don’t at first (eg Azure, Hetzner) but eventually you need to pay via a credit card, include your actual name etc.

With Cloudflare, you literally only need an email address. It continues to be free.

The second best is Hostinger, where you can pay with crypto.

Github pages is great too, but you don’t really get all the power to customize your own website.

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Cloudflare is exclusively what I use for any infra work I do (and I do a lot for various projects and startups of my own/others I advice). If something doesn’t fit cloudflare primitives, I try to rethink my design before reaching for gcloud etc.

They even do docker containers now which is great but durable objects and workers are game changer for me.

The easy nextjs deployment is also my go-to now that vercel isn’t my preferred vendor.