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Doesn't raising this kind of money scream that you're eventually going to start to monetize the data flowing through your network (e.g. telecoms selling locatio

Doesn't raising this kind of money scream that you're eventually going to start to monetize the data flowing through your network (e.g. telecoms selling location data to bounty hunters)?

jgrahamc 8y ago
No. To go into more detail: no. We make our money by selling our service to our customers.
- numbsafari 8y ago
  So does Comcast.
- adventured 8y ago
  While you're on this thread... some quick feedback. I'm a fan of your registrar service. I started experimenting with it not long ago and have begun moving most of my domains over. I understand it's still early days there. Any chance you could build up & clean up the billing reporting and controls for domains (separating it out better, making it easier to view just domain billing information & renewal info)? It's a bit haphazard currently. It would also be very nice to be able to register domains further out than a year (right now it's just a basic one year autorenewal on/off) - even if that offering cost extra per year to push the duration out. I'd guess the issue on wholesaling and allowing longer renewals, is that if the price goes up on you in the meantime, you can't pass that along (no buffer / profit margin built-in); so throw a reasonable fee on top for pushing the renewal out. As it is, I've been adding years on my existing registrar, before I move domains over to Cloudflare. Why do I want the longer duration? Peace of mind, instead of renewing every year. Not having to worry about domains expiring is a mental positive.
  - jgrahamc 8y ago
    Yep. I understand. Billing has been a frustration around Cloudflare Registrar. We are working on it. Stay tuned and sorry for the frustrations.
- m463 8y ago
  Your customers might pay to identify the people sitting at the browsers pulling down your data. A CDN is the ultimate unblockable cookie that could correlate everything else.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sascha_sl 8y ago
I think Cloudflare can still do plenty for their core paying customer base. You see less and less features making it to the free plan (mostly because there would be too much cost associated with giving it out for free). Some stuff I'm just not sure why it's not on a free plan, or even just on an Enterprise plan. I'd love to be able to send a custom 502 for instance, but instead I just remap it to 500 in nginx now... because my choice is between customization or sending the semantically correct status code. (Hey I know you browse HN CF staff, I'd drop $20 in a heartbeat to get stuff like this that's low cost to you across my account) Argo is really cool, but enabling it on my Mastodon instance would add about $200 for traffic to my bill...
- prdonahue 8y ago
  Mind elaborating on "stuff like this"? I'm all ears (eyes): pat at cloudflare.
chrisco255 8y ago
Aren't they more of a cloud services business model like AWS?
eloff 8y ago
Cloudflare generates their revenue through their paid plans and enterprise customers. I think the selling location data to the bounty hunter market against the terms of their privacy policy is rather a bit small of a market opportunity to be worth it to any rational actor...
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  But we have already seen it happen with the telecoms, so while they may not be "rational actors" clearly it's not too small a market oportunity to be worth it for some spineless businesses. Telecoms also generate their revenue by just keeping the power turned on with their existing infrastructure (yes it does require maintenance and monitoring), but that didn't stop them from trying to find additional revenue streams by further exploiting their already paying costumers. I do use Cloudflare on their free tier, and I don't think they are spying on everyone and selling ads against some profile they have built up. We'll just have to be vigilant because the status quo right now is to be big brother and sell targeted advertising.
  - avidal 8y ago
    I've been at Cloudflare just over a year now, and if there's one message that's been drilled into my head it's Trust. We understand that we're in the position that we're in largely due to trust. I like to believe that even if our CEO is a secret lizard person you'd get whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork if we tried to exploit our users.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - zackbloom 8y ago
      Interesting idea: employee canaries. You have a way to follow 1-5 employees of a company you think are honest. If they quit, you get a message.
bovermyer 8y ago
There's no reason to believe that Cloudflare, a company whose profits come from selling an _actual service_, would do this. I would strongly suggest that you reconsider your choice of metallic headgear.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  While I do think CloudFlare has earned quite a bit of trust in this regard, this is a bit of a silly argument. Cell carriers have been selling location data, despite making plenty of profit off selling a service. It's quite clear "we could be making more money" is a (potentially) compelling argument for large organizations sitting on lots of consumer data.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    OK, fair point.
  - jerf 8y ago
    You want to look at the comparative money made selling the service vs. selling the data or other secondary data streams. Cell phone companies sell the data because they are able to make quantities of money somewhat comparable to their profit from the service. Places like Google sell the data (or advertising-based access to the data, which isn't exactly the same, but from this perspective is close enough) because that's their primary revenue stream. But a place that is making a healthy profit on customers, and have no way to monetize a secondary stream at anywhere near the same amount of profit, have several incentives to not to deal with it. One is something that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around, but as a business grows, it gets to a point where it isn't necessarily worth grabbing every penny, because while the business is exerting the effort to grab that penny it's missing a dollar. (This is one of the reasons why there's no chance that Google will simply one day be the entire software industry, or why Amazon still has parters in AWS providing services that you'd think Amazon could just provide.) Another is the risk of exposure or pissing off your profitable customers when they find out about your secondary monetization; if 98% of your possible profit is the business profit and 2% the secondary monetization, then it doesn't take much perceived risk before that's a bad plan. (One of the reasons not to get too upset when some companies make a decent profit; it helps keep them from scrabbling about for ways to extract every last penny from you, which is when they start getting really destructive. You're often better off when companies are not motivated to do that, rather than trying to starve them too hard. I really wish Google and Facebook had found more productive ways to make a profit; we'd all be better off for it.)

Doesn't raising this kind of money scream that you're eventually going to start to monetize the data flowing through your network (e.g. telecoms selling location data to bounty hunters)?

jgrahamc 8y ago

No. To go into more detail: no. We make our money by selling our service to our customers.

numbsafari 8y ago
So does Comcast.
adventured 8y ago
While you're on this thread... some quick feedback. I'm a fan of your registrar service. I started experimenting with it not long ago and have begun moving most of my domains over. I understand it's still early days there. Any chance you could build up & clean up the billing reporting and controls for domains (separating it out better, making it easier to view just domain billing information & renewal info)? It's a bit haphazard currently. It would also be very nice to be able to register domains further out than a year (right now it's just a basic one year autorenewal on/off) - even if that offering cost extra per year to push the duration out. I'd guess the issue on wholesaling and allowing longer renewals, is that if the price goes up on you in the meantime, you can't pass that along (no buffer / profit margin built-in); so throw a reasonable fee on top for pushing the renewal out. As it is, I've been adding years on my existing registrar, before I move domains over to Cloudflare. Why do I want the longer duration? Peace of mind, instead of renewing every year. Not having to worry about domains expiring is a mental positive.
- jgrahamc 8y ago
  Yep. I understand. Billing has been a frustration around Cloudflare Registrar. We are working on it. Stay tuned and sorry for the frustrations.
m463 8y ago
Your customers might pay to identify the people sitting at the browsers pulling down your data. A CDN is the ultimate unblockable cookie that could correlate everything else.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sascha_sl 8y ago

I think Cloudflare can still do plenty for their core paying customer base. You see less and less features making it to the free plan (mostly because there would be too much cost associated with giving it out for free). Some stuff I'm just not sure why it's not on a free plan, or even just on an Enterprise plan. I'd love to be able to send a custom 502 for instance, but instead I just remap it to 500 in nginx now... because my choice is between customization or sending the semantically correct status code. (Hey I know you browse HN CF staff, I'd drop $20 in a heartbeat to get stuff like this that's low cost to you across my account) Argo is really cool, but enabling it on my Mastodon instance would add about $200 for traffic to my bill...

prdonahue 8y ago
Mind elaborating on "stuff like this"? I'm all ears (eyes): pat at cloudflare.

chrisco255 8y ago

Aren't they more of a cloud services business model like AWS?

eloff 8y ago

Cloudflare generates their revenue through their paid plans and enterprise customers. I think the selling location data to the bounty hunter market against the terms of their privacy policy is rather a bit small of a market opportunity to be worth it to any rational actor...

simongr3dal 8y ago
But we have already seen it happen with the telecoms, so while they may not be "rational actors" clearly it's not too small a market oportunity to be worth it for some spineless businesses. Telecoms also generate their revenue by just keeping the power turned on with their existing infrastructure (yes it does require maintenance and monitoring), but that didn't stop them from trying to find additional revenue streams by further exploiting their already paying costumers. I do use Cloudflare on their free tier, and I don't think they are spying on everyone and selling ads against some profile they have built up. We'll just have to be vigilant because the status quo right now is to be big brother and sell targeted advertising.
- avidal 8y ago
  I've been at Cloudflare just over a year now, and if there's one message that's been drilled into my head it's Trust. We understand that we're in the position that we're in largely due to trust. I like to believe that even if our CEO is a secret lizard person you'd get whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork if we tried to exploit our users.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zackbloom 8y ago
    Interesting idea: employee canaries. You have a way to follow 1-5 employees of a company you think are honest. If they quit, you get a message.

bovermyer 8y ago

There's no reason to believe that Cloudflare, a company whose profits come from selling an _actual service_, would do this. I would strongly suggest that you reconsider your choice of metallic headgear.

ceejayoz 8y ago
While I do think CloudFlare has earned quite a bit of trust in this regard, this is a bit of a silly argument. Cell carriers have been selling location data, despite making plenty of profit off selling a service. It's quite clear "we could be making more money" is a (potentially) compelling argument for large organizations sitting on lots of consumer data.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  OK, fair point.
- jerf 8y ago
  You want to look at the comparative money made selling the service vs. selling the data or other secondary data streams. Cell phone companies sell the data because they are able to make quantities of money somewhat comparable to their profit from the service. Places like Google sell the data (or advertising-based access to the data, which isn't exactly the same, but from this perspective is close enough) because that's their primary revenue stream. But a place that is making a healthy profit on customers, and have no way to monetize a secondary stream at anywhere near the same amount of profit, have several incentives to not to deal with it. One is something that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around, but as a business grows, it gets to a point where it isn't necessarily worth grabbing every penny, because while the business is exerting the effort to grab that penny it's missing a dollar. (This is one of the reasons why there's no chance that Google will simply one day be the entire software industry, or why Amazon still has parters in AWS providing services that you'd think Amazon could just provide.) Another is the risk of exposure or pissing off your profitable customers when they find out about your secondary monetization; if 98% of your possible profit is the business profit and 2% the secondary monetization, then it doesn't take much perceived risk before that's a bad plan. (One of the reasons not to get too upset when some companies make a decent profit; it helps keep them from scrabbling about for ways to extract every last penny from you, which is when they start getting really destructive. You're often better off when companies are not motivated to do that, rather than trying to starve them too hard. I really wish Google and Facebook had found more productive ways to make a profit; we'd all be better off for it.)