7 ms·

The free tier of Cloudflare has been really amazing for small to medium websites. It gives you a basically unlimited CDN, SSL, HTTP/2, DDos protection and fast

The free tier of Cloudflare has been really amazing for small to medium websites. It gives you a basically unlimited CDN, SSL, HTTP/2, DDos protection and fast DNS servers with almost 0 effort... for free ... Thus increasing the stability and speed of many web properties that otherwise wouldn't pay for it. I'm afraid this could easily change once the company is public and is under the pressures that come along with it, which is a shame. (I also try to get them paid business when I can by nudging companies to use them)

JohnAtCC 7y ago
How so? If the service is WORTH paying for, then it SHOULD be paid for. The world of service, if proven magnetizable, should always be monetized. #FreeMarkets
- rconti 7y ago
  The salami I try at Costco, as a free sample, is worth paying for. It is food, and it has value. However, they give me a small sample as an inducement to buy; presumably to increase sales beyond a baseline, in quantities and at prices sufficient to cover the cost of not only the free food they give away, but the labor to do so. Cloudflare can provide a free product that's WORTH paying for, if their paid product is so much better, and its sales increased by so much, that the free giveaway can be considered a marketing cost that pays for itself.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two. No, they don't compromise between them, nor do they reflect one more than the other: the basic law of supply and demand is that markets clear at the quantity and price where the marginal cost to produce equals the marginal value to customers which also equals the sale price.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works. Assumptions made for what you said to play out include: perfect competition, perfect information, perfect rationality of actors, 0 barrier to entry, that value and cost is strongly bounded and defined on either end, and much more. Common examples that violate each one in term: Facebook, Used cars, Veblen goods, Utilities, Healthcare. A market that has one large player that completely dominates certain segment(s) is not likely to be a healthy one that is providing value at near cost, why would it be? The incentive is always to charge as much as possible.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works. I don't think there is actually an equilibrium price defined as some kind of compromise between supply and demand curves absent those circumstances, either; there's an actual price at any given time, but it's not an equilibrium (particularly, without rationality—which incorporates perfect information—you don't have any expectation of an equilibrium even if all the other factors are present, at any price.) Once you are discussing equilibrium—as the post the grandparent addressed did—you are implicitly discussing at least some of the ideal circumstances you’d like to negate.
        throwaway2048 7y ago
        The market can still reach equilibrium even with non optimal conditions, just not the "efficient market" equilibrium. Additionally, irrational does not mean unpredictable, after all advertising is extremely effective.
- empath75 7y ago
  It’s quite possible that cloudflare gains more value from the customers than they gain from cloudflare.
  - lhill 7y ago
    For instance? (Honest question)
    - humblebee 7y ago
      > Free customer base—Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers sign up for our service through our self-serve portal and are typically individual developers, early stage startups, hobbyists, and other users. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      It adds latency to API services, it doesn't add value in conditions where you aren't under attack. It inhibits legitimate users with privacy controls (and/or Firefox) in place. It may or may not be worth it, but it isn't a panacea.
- squirrelicus 7y ago
  I'm a #freemarket guy and all, but freemium is a long standing monetization model that many companies have used to accelerate net profits in the long run. Not really anything anti free market about freemium. The problem with freemium has always been building the premium tier that someone wants to pay for :P
louis-paul 7y ago
They list it as a key element of their business model: > Free customer base—Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers sign up for our service through our self-serve portal and are typically individual developers, early stage startups, hobbyists, and other users. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers. (page 80)
- cosmie 7y ago
  This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just continues to reinforce what I said at the end of [2], about their business model instilling confidence in leveraging them at a free-tier level. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411
  - btown 7y ago
    Yea, it didn't occur to me either - as implementers we'd be like "why would we want the responsibility of so much scale that we need to support without corresponding revenue," but in their position they can say "we need all the tooling for that scale anyways, why don't we leverage that into better bulk discounts with the interconnections!" And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader.
OrgNet 7y ago
Cloudflare is getting too big so I'm all for anything that could possibly make it smaller
- nannal 7y ago
  In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets. Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts. Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.
  - the_duke 7y ago
    Site owners can turn off the captcha by reducing the security level. I understand why it exists, I just wish they didn't use a Google service for it... The lack of competition probably shows the difficulty of the task. A global CDN is complicated and expensive (physical infrastructure, all the interconnect agreements) and a big technical challenge.
    - alexnewman 7y ago
      hcaptcha.com
    - Ayesh 7y ago
      It is quite possible to setup a global CDN overnight. Spin nginx reverse proxies in all AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode POSs, and you'd have a good enough network. Throw Inna control panel and you got yourself a contender in the budget CDN sector. Cloudflare was rather innovative, with their authorative and recursive DNS, peering agreements with many ISPs including the ones that others didn't bother about, free SSL (Which they offered with Comodo even before Let's Encrypt), etc.
      - manquer 7y ago
        That is a fast way to burn a lot of money . Cloud Service Providers like the ones you mention heavily marked up sell metered bandwidth with no guaranteed allocation and are considerably more expensive than say a tier-2 player like hetzner/OVH or spinning your own servers in a Colo.
JorgeGT 7y ago
You forgot the API! I have my own dynamic DNS with a raspberry and the cloudflare API for instance, it's very useful.
- apexalpha 7y ago
  Oh I didn't know you could do that. Do you move the Rpi around a lot? What do you use the dynamic dns for?
  - SXX 7y ago
    Many ISPs around the world give you public IPs without NAT, but they're dynamic and change every once in a while.
    - JorgeGT 7y ago
      Exactly my case! So I have a cronjob that compares the current IP with the previous one and, if different, sends an API request to update the DNS record.
      - ollerac 7y ago
        Can you do a quick write up about how to do this? As a web developer, I feel like I should know how to host my own website from my own machine, but I've always struggled to get all the right steps in place. It'd be nice to hear from someone more experienced, so I can make sure to do it correctly!
        icebraining 7y ago
        Essentially you write a script in any language that: 1) checks what's your current IP (an easy way is to do a GET request to http://icanhazip.com/ http://icanhazip.com/, available thanks to Red Hat engineer Major Hayden) 2) checks what was the last IP you sent to Cloudflare (saved in a text file on your disk or something like data) 3) if they are different, send a PUT request to the Cloudflare API with the new IP: https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dns-record https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dn... 4) Then save that new IP in the text file, so you can check next time Finally, you edit your crontab to run that script every few hours or so.
davchana 7y ago
This. I have about 20+ hobbyish domains total, & 13 of them are with free Cloudflare Plan, & 3 of them are with their Domain Registrar side. I am completely fine with their free tier & paying for Domain Reg/Renewal. But just in case if in future i need to paygor DNS hosting, I would fallback to regular domain registar's free dns.
- bufferoverflow 7y ago
  I had one website that I was working on, basically zero traffic, besides me testing it. After a couple of months Cloudflare kicked me off the free tier, asked for money. No idea why. I didn't use much of their resources, well within the limits.
  - therein 7y ago
    That's quite peculiar. I never had that happen and I have over 10 domains with them that I'd describe as basically zero traffic.
  - dkoston 7y ago
    Agree that this seems suspect. Have had free domains with plenty of traffic on them for years.
- mooreds 7y ago
  Domain reg/renewal, once you have the infrastructure, seems like it would be minting money.
i_cant_speel 7y ago
I'd imagine there is significant value in capturing small customers with a free product who end up growing into their enterprise products.

JohnAtCC 7y ago

How so? If the service is WORTH paying for, then it SHOULD be paid for. The world of service, if proven magnetizable, should always be monetized. #FreeMarkets

rconti 7y ago
The salami I try at Costco, as a free sample, is worth paying for. It is food, and it has value. However, they give me a small sample as an inducement to buy; presumably to increase sales beyond a baseline, in quantities and at prices sufficient to cover the cost of not only the free food they give away, but the labor to do so. Cloudflare can provide a free product that's WORTH paying for, if their paid product is so much better, and its sales increased by so much, that the free giveaway can be considered a marketing cost that pays for itself.
whatshisface 7y ago
Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two. No, they don't compromise between them, nor do they reflect one more than the other: the basic law of supply and demand is that markets clear at the quantity and price where the marginal cost to produce equals the marginal value to customers which also equals the sale price.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works. Assumptions made for what you said to play out include: perfect competition, perfect information, perfect rationality of actors, 0 barrier to entry, that value and cost is strongly bounded and defined on either end, and much more. Common examples that violate each one in term: Facebook, Used cars, Veblen goods, Utilities, Healthcare. A market that has one large player that completely dominates certain segment(s) is not likely to be a healthy one that is providing value at near cost, why would it be? The incentive is always to charge as much as possible.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works. I don't think there is actually an equilibrium price defined as some kind of compromise between supply and demand curves absent those circumstances, either; there's an actual price at any given time, but it's not an equilibrium (particularly, without rationality—which incorporates perfect information—you don't have any expectation of an equilibrium even if all the other factors are present, at any price.) Once you are discussing equilibrium—as the post the grandparent addressed did—you are implicitly discussing at least some of the ideal circumstances you’d like to negate.
      - throwaway2048 7y ago
        The market can still reach equilibrium even with non optimal conditions, just not the "efficient market" equilibrium. Additionally, irrational does not mean unpredictable, after all advertising is extremely effective.
empath75 7y ago
It’s quite possible that cloudflare gains more value from the customers than they gain from cloudflare.
- lhill 7y ago
  For instance? (Honest question)
  - humblebee 7y ago
    > Free customer base—Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers sign up for our service through our self-serve portal and are typically individual developers, early stage startups, hobbyists, and other users. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    It adds latency to API services, it doesn't add value in conditions where you aren't under attack. It inhibits legitimate users with privacy controls (and/or Firefox) in place. It may or may not be worth it, but it isn't a panacea.
squirrelicus 7y ago
I'm a #freemarket guy and all, but freemium is a long standing monetization model that many companies have used to accelerate net profits in the long run. Not really anything anti free market about freemium. The problem with freemium has always been building the premium tier that someone wants to pay for :P

louis-paul 7y ago

They list it as a key element of their business model: > Free customer base—Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers sign up for our service through our self-serve portal and are typically individual developers, early stage startups, hobbyists, and other users. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers. (page 80)

cosmie 7y ago
This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just continues to reinforce what I said at the end of [2], about their business model instilling confidence in leveraging them at a free-tier level. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411
- btown 7y ago
  Yea, it didn't occur to me either - as implementers we'd be like "why would we want the responsibility of so much scale that we need to support without corresponding revenue," but in their position they can say "we need all the tooling for that scale anyways, why don't we leverage that into better bulk discounts with the interconnections!" And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader.

OrgNet 7y ago

Cloudflare is getting too big so I'm all for anything that could possibly make it smaller

nannal 7y ago
In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets. Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts. Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.
- the_duke 7y ago
  Site owners can turn off the captcha by reducing the security level. I understand why it exists, I just wish they didn't use a Google service for it... The lack of competition probably shows the difficulty of the task. A global CDN is complicated and expensive (physical infrastructure, all the interconnect agreements) and a big technical challenge.
  - alexnewman 7y ago
    hcaptcha.com
  - Ayesh 7y ago
    It is quite possible to setup a global CDN overnight. Spin nginx reverse proxies in all AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode POSs, and you'd have a good enough network. Throw Inna control panel and you got yourself a contender in the budget CDN sector. Cloudflare was rather innovative, with their authorative and recursive DNS, peering agreements with many ISPs including the ones that others didn't bother about, free SSL (Which they offered with Comodo even before Let's Encrypt), etc.
    - manquer 7y ago
      That is a fast way to burn a lot of money . Cloud Service Providers like the ones you mention heavily marked up sell metered bandwidth with no guaranteed allocation and are considerably more expensive than say a tier-2 player like hetzner/OVH or spinning your own servers in a Colo.

JorgeGT 7y ago

You forgot the API! I have my own dynamic DNS with a raspberry and the cloudflare API for instance, it's very useful.

apexalpha 7y ago
Oh I didn't know you could do that. Do you move the Rpi around a lot? What do you use the dynamic dns for?
- SXX 7y ago
  Many ISPs around the world give you public IPs without NAT, but they're dynamic and change every once in a while.
  - JorgeGT 7y ago
    Exactly my case! So I have a cronjob that compares the current IP with the previous one and, if different, sends an API request to update the DNS record.
    - ollerac 7y ago
      Can you do a quick write up about how to do this? As a web developer, I feel like I should know how to host my own website from my own machine, but I've always struggled to get all the right steps in place. It'd be nice to hear from someone more experienced, so I can make sure to do it correctly!
      - icebraining 7y ago
        Essentially you write a script in any language that: 1) checks what's your current IP (an easy way is to do a GET request to http://icanhazip.com/ http://icanhazip.com/, available thanks to Red Hat engineer Major Hayden) 2) checks what was the last IP you sent to Cloudflare (saved in a text file on your disk or something like data) 3) if they are different, send a PUT request to the Cloudflare API with the new IP: https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dns-record https://api.cloudflare.com/#dns-records-for-a-zone-update-dn... 4) Then save that new IP in the text file, so you can check next time Finally, you edit your crontab to run that script every few hours or so.

davchana 7y ago

This. I have about 20+ hobbyish domains total, & 13 of them are with free Cloudflare Plan, & 3 of them are with their Domain Registrar side. I am completely fine with their free tier & paying for Domain Reg/Renewal. But just in case if in future i need to paygor DNS hosting, I would fallback to regular domain registar's free dns.

bufferoverflow 7y ago
I had one website that I was working on, basically zero traffic, besides me testing it. After a couple of months Cloudflare kicked me off the free tier, asked for money. No idea why. I didn't use much of their resources, well within the limits.
- therein 7y ago
  That's quite peculiar. I never had that happen and I have over 10 domains with them that I'd describe as basically zero traffic.
- dkoston 7y ago
  Agree that this seems suspect. Have had free domains with plenty of traffic on them for years.
mooreds 7y ago
Domain reg/renewal, once you have the infrastructure, seems like it would be minting money.

i_cant_speel 7y ago

I'd imagine there is significant value in capturing small customers with a free product who end up growing into their enterprise products.