13 ms·
A bit of math around Cloudflare's R2 pricing model
- goatmale 5y ago$53k* without development support.
- dang 5y agoUrl changed from https://unrollthread.com/t/1443028078196711426/ https://unrollthread.com/t/1443028078196711426/, which points to this*. It's fine to provide alternate URLs for Twitter threads (I know how some of you feel) but please do it by posting them in the comments. From the site guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html * or rather, doesn't point to it? that's not good (edit: it does point to it now - sorry if I missed it earlier.)
- scrame 5y agoThank you. The original link was worse than the twitter thread.
- ectopod 5y agoThe unrollthread page does have a link to the original twitter thread. At the top, labelled @QuinnyPig. Anyway, guidelines are guidelines, not cast iron rules. When the original site is hot garbage I'd much rather see an alternative.
- acdha 5y ago> When the original site is hot garbage I'd much rather see an alternative. I find the experience worse than Twitter's default web view with the odd reformatting and wasted space around tweets — compared to the native view, I see 5/7 as much text on a page — and most thread unrollers intentionally obscure the original link to keep you on their site so you have to be familiar with their UI or scrub the links to find it if you want to interact with the tweet (a common use for social media).
- dang 5y agoThe community is divided on that. No doubt most agree that hot garbage is in the mix but there is no agreement at all about what the hot garbage actually is—one user's garbage is another user's...delicious pot pie? I don't know. If there were a consensus I'd be happy to go with it and suspend the rule, but given that there's zero consensus, we should stick with the rule.
- Dylan16807 5y agoThe layout on unrollthread is really confusing if you don't realize it came from twitter. It's kind of garbage too. I kept wondering whether there were missing images in some of the ". . ." Something like https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443028078196711426.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1443028078196711426.html I might advocate for. Better layout, plenty of links back, etc.
- froggertoaster 5y agoQuinn hit the nail on the head here. I mean, his politics are awful. But when it comes to cloud, there are few smarter.
- refulgentis 5y agoI get the "lol aws is owned" angle but it beggars belief that a petabyte of data transfer only costs $0.13. This is clearly unsustainable and we'll have to find out later what the hidden cost is
- babelfish 5y agoYou can see what egress costs companies in this Cloudflare blog post - TLDR they pay for the size of the hose, not the amount of water flowing through it https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
- dannyw 5y agoThe other TL;DR is that AWS's markup on bandwidth for US/Canada is 80x.
- QuinnyPig 5y agoExactly. Those of us who spent time in the data center and network world had some adjustment to go through when we first encountered the cloud bandwidth billing model. It hasn’t aged particularly well either.
- kuschku 5y agoWhich is why so many never left that world. e.g. I run my k8s clusters on dedicated Hetzner machines to avoid this entire pricing model. Even accounting for devops time it’s cheaper than AWS, GCP or Azure.
- yunohn 5y agoMy long term understanding from Cloudflare blog posts is that network activity is actually incredibly cheap, moreso when you own a ton of the underlying infra. Thing is, all cloud providers do own the pipes, so they just rent-seek on egress pricing. Cloudflare is disrupting that model.
- 5y ago
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoI just... can someone more knowledgeable verify that this isn't overlooking something? This feels way too good to be true.
- QuinnyPig 5y agoYeah, I overlooked the fact that the AWS calculator added Developer tier support. Past that it's correct. I assure you, AWS would have Set The Record Straight(tm) otherwise before now.
- sitkack 5y agoRoast GCP egress next!
- QuinnyPig 5y agoIf AWS comes down to within hailing distance of reasonable, everyone else will too.
- sitkack 5y agoI mean come on, Google's egress is free. They lease their dark fiber to run backbone links and telecoms. How much do they pay to egress YT?
- sieabah 5y agoWhat are you talking about? It's absolutely not free at all. https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#network-pricing https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing#network-pricing The only thing that is free is between nodes of the same zone using specifically the internal IPs.
- AlexAndScripts 5y agoWhat they charge is not what it costs them.
- sfredd 5y agoCloudflare will charge per request over a certain threshold, like S3 does for API calls, so it won’t be just 13 cents depending on the rate of requests coming in. “R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers. Our object storage will be extremely inexpensive for infrequent access and yet capable of and cheaper than major incumbent providers at scale.” Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/
- dannyw 5y agoPer operation charges, even if at the same level as EC2, would still be substantially cheaper. The lack of 9c per GB to egress is the killer. I can rent unlimited 250mbit servers for 14 euros a month from Scaleway. It is truly unmetered; I've been a customer for years and do about 40 terabytes of egress a month on this box. AWS would charge me $3800 for the egress alone (using the calculator). That is certainly almost all pure margin for them, when Scaleway will happily let me egress 40TB a month for years on 13.99 euro per month (plus I get a low-spec bare metal server at this price too).
- sfredd 5y agoNot disagreeing with you! Just pointing out that there will be additional costs over just 13 cents. Excited to check out R2.
- prirun 5y agoEven on S3, operations costs are a very tiny fraction of bandwidth costs: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html
- kondro 5y agoLack of egress charge is great for write once, read a lot. But for write once, read a handful of times (e.g. a webhook system that basically is write once, read once of <32KB objects with long history for either redelivery attempts or replaying the entire stream for a point of time), request prices end up being the biggest cost.
- datavirtue 5y agoIt hit me today, bandwidth is the digital currency of the internet. Discuss.
- SilverRed 5y agoIt's not a currency but a utility. You can't buy and hold bandwidth like you can currency.
- dannyw 5y agoNot directly, but Filecoin is launching a retrieval market where you'll indeed be able to buy, hod, and sell bandwidth like a currency; just like you can for storage today.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eastdakota 5y agoFrom very early in our history, this is something my cofounder Michelle often said. It’s fascinating how the economics and incentives of bandwidth change with scale. Figuring that out early was key to our success and continues to inform our strategy. The other interesting thing is not all bandwidth is created equal. We provide services like 1.1.1.1 and infrastructure to root server operators in order to have a “currency” that’s helpful to ISPs who invite us into their networks. The number of times we’ve gotten invited into some telecom’s network because the network admin’s favorite sports team (or whatever) uses the free version of our service is… fascinating. And since every server in our network runs every service, once we’re in for one thing means everything we do in the region gets better and less expensive to operate. This means, counter intuitively, as we add more locations to our network our costs generally go down, not up.
- sitkack 5y agoHow much space and power do you get access into the ISP locations you are in? Are we talking single 4u and 8a? Or full racks, I suppose the answer is always, "it depends." What does the hardware side of CF look like? You must be toying with custom silicon. It always baffled me that regional ISPs weren't selling that last mile bandwidth to customers for real dollars. Even over DSL lines in the late 90s one could have run an amazing VoD service.
- noway421 5y agoFor me, the last piece of the puzzle is RDS. If cloudflare can deliver a managed database, I would not see a reason to use AWS for new projects/ideas I'm tinkering with.
- eastdakota 5y agoWorking on it. Distributed makes it… non-trivial. But if we pull off what we think we can…
- nerdbaggy 5y agoI hope for enterprise customers it will allow pay as you go. We were really interesting in Spectrum and the price was in our range but having a contract for our current capacity for 1 year didn’t make sense. And our needed throughputs were very spikey. It didn’t make sense to pay for 3k concurrent users when our 80th percentile would be around 1k.
- square_usual 5y agoGoddamn, extremely exciting stuff. Between this and fly.io, looks like exciting times for building distributed systems!
- m_ke 5y agoDo GPUs at a reasonable price next and you'll own the ML space. R2 will be amazing for hosting computer vision datasets and models.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoI'm not sure if the GPU for ML space is a fit for cloudflare. It is for a cloud hoster. But ML does not take advantage of cloudflare's competitive edge ( their SDN ). In the same way, i don't think docker containers are an interesting/good fit ( i could be wrong on this though) Edit: i was wrong...
- m_ke 5y ago
- plasma 5y agoAnother comparable is 100tb.com which can give you 100TB/m of bandwidth for $275/m (or for 1 million Gigabytes as the linked article uses, $2,750). Cloudflare still wins this estimate at 13c, and AWS remains expensive at 55k. I’m assuming the bandwidth traffic helps improve Cloudflares other offerings (eg, insights).
- digianarchist 5y agoThat's servers though right? Not object storage.
- plasma 5y agoAh, each server gives you 100TB/month of network bandwidth.
- StratusBen 5y agoIt's amazing how much conversation Cloudflare has created with this without even releasing the product yet. I can't remember the last time there was this much interest in a new product launch - which gives an indication to the market need for pricing changes on this front. However, AWS re:invent is right around the corner and I suspect this will cause an announcement or two to come from the AWS side.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago> However, AWS re:invent is right around the corner and I suspect this will cause an announcement or two to come from the AWS side. Call me a pessimist, but I expect that will happen around the same time they make managed NAT gateways reasonably priced. I'm going to say never. I'll likely be right for years before I am eventually wrong due to the sticker price not moving but inflation making it relatively affordable. Go ahead AWS, prove me wrong!
- judge2020 5y agoAWS's lock-in is in the egress. If you already got multiple petabytes ingested into AWS (for free), it's going to cost you a lot to send them to CF once.
- eastdakota 5y agoExcept you can put R2 in front of S3 and set it to "slurp" mode. That way as objects are requested through the normal course of use they'll be stored in R2. You can then keep S3 as a backup, or delete the objects that have moved over. Being a proxy is cool.
- mintplant 5y agoBesides Cloudflare's pedigree and CDN reach, is there any other reason this is considered revolutionary when, say, Wasabi [0] already exists with the same no-egress-charges pricing model? I'm not affiliated with either company, just trying to get a handle on the hype. [0] https://wasabi.com/ https://wasabi.com/
- dannyw 5y agoWasabi limits egress to your total storage.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago> For example, if you store 100 TB with Wasabi and download (egress) 100 TB or less within a monthly billing cycle, then your storage use case is a good fit for our policy. If your monthly downloads exceed 100 TB, then your use case is not a good fit. > If your use case exceeds the guidelines of our free egress policy on a regular basis, we reserve the right to limit or suspend your service. https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy
- duskwuff 5y agoIn short, they're a backup/archival service, not a general-purpose object store. Egress is free because you're expected to use it infrequently.
- celsoazevedo 5y agoYes. But I guess it can also be used like a general-purpose object store, we just have to pay them for the bandwidth used or have a CDN in front to cache stuff.
- duskwuff 5y agoNo, I really don't think it can. Literally nothing in the marketing copy describes this use case -- it's all about backup/archival use applications. And the bit in the TOS you quoted makes it clear that Wasabi isn't interested in high-bandwidth customers at any price point. Even with a good caching CDN, most public applications won't be able to hit the "egress < storage" target that Wasabi expects.
- ablekh 5y agoA much more extensive discussion of the same news can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237.
- throwaw73747493 5y agoBack when bandwidth and network connectivity was an extremely rare commodity, we had to innovate to provide the functionality we wanted. Torrents, email, multi-part download/upload, compression algorithms, traffic shaping, software mirrors. The resilient parts of the digital world were born out of creatively circumventing our limitations. In a world with no limitations, we're free to no longer be creative.
- sitkack 5y agoTime to be creative in other dimensions. Creativity doesn't only have to happen in scarcity, it can also flourish in largesse.
- mmahemoff 5y ago"Now let’s remember that the internet is 1-to-many. If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s $59,247.52." When I first saw this, my thought was it's highly misleading since you'd normally be fronting S3 with a CDN, so you'd only have to pay once to transfer a given resource every few days/weeks/months if the CDN is doing its job, and it can be served to millions of people at no or low cost (already been free on Cloudflare for a long time). Then I came to my senses and realised there's probably orgs who don't know/care about that and they're actually paying these fees for every request. Anyway, it's excellent to see this released. S3 is not just more expensive and tied to a single data centre. It's also bad DX, e.g. setting up permissions is way too complicated and the console is "brutalist" in both look and function. I hope this spurs some more competition in the area of storage.
- aeharding 5y agoA lot of orgs use all AWS, with CloudFront for their CDN, which also has high outgoing bandwidth fees (cached or not)
- sudhirj 5y agoSo Cloudfront at the base price is more expensive depending on the geography. That said, you can restrict your price class to class 100, let the volume pricing kick in, etc to get a maybe a 10% to 50% discount at huge volumes. Or you could negotiate and prepay / pre-commit to get a 60% to 70% discount. The difference is still insane.
- calcifer 5y agoHe answered [1] that using AWS' on CDN actually makes things worse: > Okay, then it’ll be 8.5¢ to 12¢ per GB depending upon where you happen to be downloading it from. [1] https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1443135455763984384 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1443135455763984384
- mattferderer 5y agoJeff Bezos has a famous quote - "Your margin is my opportunity" Kudos Cloudflare! You won the Internet this week!
- k8sToGo 5y agoOne thing I like about R2 is that it is affordable and can even be used for private stuff. Most AWS stuff I cannot use as a private person because the costs explode.
- valyagolev 5y agoI hope it means that the content has a chance to be un-siloed again. As I understand, sites like images hostings are mostly bandwidth-limited... Perhaps we'll see some good developments here
- mmaunder 5y agoI’d speculate CFs secret sauce here is working their asses off to negotiate peering arrangements globally, and avoiding paying transit. Then passing on the savings.
- jamesbr 5y agoCloud providers simply charge insane markups on very cheap bandwidth. You or I can buy transit from e.g. he.net for ~$0.15/mbit/mo. 10Gbit transit @ $1500/mo will transfer 3PB/mo. 3PB egress on AWS = $157,491.11/mo.
- iptrans 5y ago100G transit is even cheaper at $5k/month. And that’s before you take into account you can do settlement free peering at Internet exchanges.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PikachuEXE 5y ago(Maybe off topic) Anyone tried using User > Cloudflare > S3 directly? Seems slower than User > Cloudflare > CloudFront > S3. (Using this for website CDN)
- jonoberg 5y agoI've seen both types of deployments. I never understood the second one. Less hops generally means better performance.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoIf there's a speed difference at all, it would be negligible, and would only apply for the first few requests, as after that, Cloudflare will have a cached copy.
- alexatalktome 5y agoIf this pricing model described in these tweets is actually accurate once R2 is released and once AWS responds (assuming that R2 doesn’t suck for other reasons) then this is business-plan-changing good pricing. Imagine a competitor to YouTube. Storing tons of video content is expensive. Serving it to users is also expensive. Especially with those egress pricings. 1M * 1gb of egress costing 54k is completely undoable profitably unless that data is very valuable. Meanwhile <$1 is “put this MVP startup product on my credit card while applying to YCombinator” affordable. If R2 could point to Backblaze instead of S3 as a compatibility layer (S3 compatible so should be easy), the you could have CHEAP redundancy and low costs without any egress fees. I can think of several niche video sharing use cases not wel serviced by YouTube that just aren’t profitable enough to host so haven’t seen any startups succeed and I can totally see it now happening. Maybe I’ll try to make it happen…
- gigatexal 5y agoIt’s really good to see Cloudflare step up and compete like this. If they are successful Amazon will lower prices or throw in so much extra utility or value that the existing costs will make sense.
- PaywallBuster 5y agoYou could keep all your stuff in AWS and this would still come in hand. The web servers in EC2 would still receive the data from the user and then uplaod to S3 and/or R2. From there you could give users the link to R2 to get the cheaper bandwidth/usage fees. Cloudflare also have additional services like Image Resizing which would completely remove 3rd party services like Imgix. There's too many companies paying thousands for S3+Imgix which could easily save 80% of their bill with alternative solutions (haven't tried CF resizing yet) My post about it https://pedrogomes.medium.com/how-to-save-90-of-your-imgix-monthly-invoice-3b196a045a4d https://pedrogomes.medium.com/how-to-save-90-of-your-imgix-m...
- Daiz 5y agoWith the introduction of their own big storage, I hope Cloudflare also has plans for expanding workers into bigger tasks. I'm currently doing a bunch of intensive data processing on Lambda as part of site admin operations which would impossible to port over to CF Workers because of their strict limits. Those strict limits make sense without their own big storage in the picture, but with the introduction of R2 it would consequently make sense to me to expand Workers into enabling intensive use case scenarios as well.
- abiro 5y agoI'd love to love this, but I've been bitten so many times by flashy Cloudflare products that sound amazing on paper, that I'm extremely sceptical of anything that the company offers at this point. If it sounds too good to be true -- it usually is.
- aynsof 5y agoCan you give any specifics on this?
- abiro 5y agoLike when an exception in Cloudflare Workers would display a page telling you to look in the logs for the error, but it took me days of back and forth with support to figure out that THERE ARE NO LOGS. Or Cloudflare Pages not having atomic deployments leading to occasional small downtime on deployments. Or the horror of setting up full strict SSL with Heroku...
- aynsof 5y agoThanks for sharing!
- danpalmer 5y agoI've wondered for a long time what the cost to bill accurately for cloud providers is. Is a lot of the cost associated with S3 API requests or outbound network traffic actually the cost of all the logging/metrics infrastructure needed to bill accurately for it? > R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. If you a) don't bill for those in the 90th percentile of access and b) aren't too specific about the point at which you start billing, then you can eliminate a huge amount of complexity.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- moogly 5y agoVery interested to see the pricing per operation (and the definition thereof; is it going to be 4 kB = 1 op like Durable Objects?). Apart from using it at scale at work, this might also become a pretty good and cheap solution for personal backup.
- devit 5y agoPrice still seems absurdly high for backup purposes. $0.015/GB/month means $150/10TB/month, but you can buy an 10TB USB hard drive for around $150-250 which is likely to last at least 10 years on average, so the service costs on the order of 100 times the cost of just the drives. Though maybe CloudFlare is not the best suited company for the "lots of cheap drives for backup" business.
- snak 5y agoI'd say that comparison over-simplifies what Cloudflare does behind the scenes. - Electricity costs - 99.999999999% (eleven 9’s) of annual durability - Speed of your HDD (around 200 MB/s?) vs speed of R2 ...
- 1cvmask 5y ago- 99.999999999% (eleven 9’s) of annual durability By the way this is the SLA terms from Cloudflare's website: Q: What type of Service Level Agreement (SLA) do you offer? A: Cloudflare provides a SLA for our Business and Enterprise plans. Cloudflare's Business plan offers a 100% uptime guarantee. In the event of downtime, customers receive a service credit against their monthly fee, in proportion to the respective disruption and affected customer ratio. You can view the full Business plan SLA, here: https://www.cloudflare.com/business-sla/ https://www.cloudflare.com/business-sla/ Cloudflare Enterprise customers receive a 10x credit (included in the Standard Success Offering) against the monthly fee, in proportion to the respective disruption and affected customer ratio. The Premium Success Offering includes 25x reimbursement uptime SLA. You can view the full Enterprise plan SLA, here: https://www.cloudflare.com/enterprise_support_sla/ https://www.cloudflare.com/enterprise_support_sla/
- rafaelturk 5y agoKudos Cloudlare.. but I've tried to migrate to cloudflare a couple of times.. I've never was able to find a way to setup routing for each `/path` of my website. I have different repos each controling one aspect of my website. This is a breaze to setup using cloudfront `origins`. My best guess is that I have to setup a Nginx between my content and cloudflare. Maybe its me but I've always found cloudflare UI/UX confusing and hard to use. AWS is very bare metal UI, but it actually makes sense. Hopefully as Cloudflare is launching new products, like R2, will force them to improve UI.
- samcat116 5y agoI would 100% disagree with this. The AWS UI is considerably more confusing and complex than the cloudflare UI, even if just due to the fewer number of features and options.
- rafaelturk 5y agoYeah AWS is a mess.. Maybe proper way to phrase this: Is not really a UI problem, is more like how features are organized. Problem remains using AWS Cloudfront I can route content to different sources. I can't do this with cloudflare.
- eeegnu 5y ago> R2 will provide 99.999999999% (eleven 9’s) of annual durability, which describes the likelihood of data loss. If you store 1,000,000 objects on R2, you can expect to lose one once every 100,000 years — the same level of durability as other major providers. I've seen this kind of marketing allot from cloud providers, and it always makes me wonder. At that point the probability that you're going to lose your data gets dominated by the probability of a rogue employee deleting your data, or of 3 simultaneous natural disasters destroying every warehouse your data was replicated to, or most likely someone gaining malicious access and deleting a bunch of stuff. Those are a little harder to quantify though.
- JTbane 5y agoThese sorts of numbers are total bunk- the likelihood is pretty high one of their services go down (or something happens to your connection to Cloudflare) that will knock you offline for a few hours, maybe a day.
- cobookman 5y agodurability != uptime. The 11 9s of durability encompass the likelihood they'd loose your data.
- michaelfairley 5y agoDurability is not availability.
- Dylan16807 5y agoThe chance of three simultaneous natural disasters should still be a lot lower than that number. But yeah, hackers or software faults are almost certainly more likely than that number would suggest.