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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 o

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.
  - cosmie 7y ago
    > And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader. It's basically real world chaos monkeys that are stress testing their systems. Combined with signal intelligence, those chaos monkeys are actively improving their systems. Then, as a final bonus, absorbing the DDoS attacks aimed at those chaos monkeys (and their paid tier) provides a lot of globally diverse and distributed inbound traffic to them, favorably offsetting the outbound traffic they're serving from from their network. Improving their position during interconnect negotiations. There are quite natural synergies that emerge as a product of their particular choices in structuring their business. Which is far more rare of a thing than you'd expect.
craftyguy 7y ago
> They list it as a key element of their business model: And we all know public companies never change 'key elements' of their business models... (hint: they do)

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.
- cosmie 7y ago
  > And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader. It's basically real world chaos monkeys that are stress testing their systems. Combined with signal intelligence, those chaos monkeys are actively improving their systems. Then, as a final bonus, absorbing the DDoS attacks aimed at those chaos monkeys (and their paid tier) provides a lot of globally diverse and distributed inbound traffic to them, favorably offsetting the outbound traffic they're serving from from their network. Improving their position during interconnect negotiations. There are quite natural synergies that emerge as a product of their particular choices in structuring their business. Which is far more rare of a thing than you'd expect.

craftyguy 7y ago

> They list it as a key element of their business model: And we all know public companies never change 'key elements' of their business models... (hint: they do)