On the cloud providers, you are paying for your usage (yes, marked up, but they have costs too). Cloudflare has the same model, but they distribute the costs.

On the cloud providers, you are paying for your usage (yes, marked up, but they have costs too). Cloudflare has the same model, but they distribute the costs. The vast majority of people never use anywhere close to their share, so they subsidize the outliers and the free tier.