6 ms·

I actually have a similar story about Cloudflare, image hosting, billing and support, but the amounts involved were nowhere near as high. I was evaluating imag

I actually have a similar story about Cloudflare, image hosting, billing and support, but the amounts involved were nowhere near as high. I was evaluating image hosts a while ago. CF Images seemed promising but I was afraid that my use-case would grow to become cost-prohibitive, and I really didn't want to deal with a migration off it later. So I settled on rolling-my-own with R2 and ffmpeg to pre-generate a few renditions [1]. In short, R2 billing is weird. I actually haven't updated my bucket in months and yet the storage amount fluctuates a bit month-to-month. (Is R2 storage accounting probabilistic?!?) I also got hit by a billing line item in May for "R2 late usage" from Feb to March which I could not find any information about. Their support only recently got back to me, with a very unhelpful / irrelevant answer of course. The amounts involved are only ~$1 so I don't care too much - I was mostly curious - and I don't blame them for maybe not wanting to expend too much effort looking into irregularities on such a tiny account. No regrets though. Using CF Images would still be 5x more expensive month-to-month even at my (tiny) scale. The $5-per-100k flat-rate is probably the thing that allows them to make any money on image hosting. [1] Word to the wise - there are a lot of subtleties around building production-scale image hosting that often times it may be much easier to simply pay the premium for a managed service. For example, what if you want to only generate renditions just-in-time to save on storage? What about updating your rendition list on the fly, eg adding a new one, or even removing older ones from storage? When / how often should you sweep storage of unused renditions?

burnte 2y ago
I looked at Cloudflare for DNS and domain registration. It's so hypercomplicated that I can easily understand that people may not understand how billing really works, and that some of those people work inside CF. I'm not trying to be insulting, it's just that from my limited experience, man, they're complicated.
judge2020 2y ago
My CF billing seems to be "day of the month" which might explain the differing prices based on the month; R2 storage is supposedly "GB-month" but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually GB-hour on the backend. Does it follow that scale (e.g. June with 30 days should be ~96.8% the cost of May's 31 days)?
- jallmann 2y ago
  Interesting ... I checked and the difference is closer to 5% ($0.99 May vs $1.04 June), and June's invoice was actually higher than May's. They are billing that amount because the storage amount itself is fluctuating (alternating 66 and 69 GB) with zero writes / deletes to the bucket since around March, and staying well within the free tier for reads. Will probably have to leave it be as one of the mysteries of life :)

burnte 2y ago

I looked at Cloudflare for DNS and domain registration. It's so hypercomplicated that I can easily understand that people may not understand how billing really works, and that some of those people work inside CF. I'm not trying to be insulting, it's just that from my limited experience, man, they're complicated.

judge2020 2y ago

My CF billing seems to be "day of the month" which might explain the differing prices based on the month; R2 storage is supposedly "GB-month" but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually GB-hour on the backend. Does it follow that scale (e.g. June with 30 days should be ~96.8% the cost of May's 31 days)?

jallmann 2y ago
Interesting ... I checked and the difference is closer to 5% ($0.99 May vs $1.04 June), and June's invoice was actually higher than May's. They are billing that amount because the storage amount itself is fluctuating (alternating 66 and 69 GB) with zero writes / deletes to the bucket since around March, and staying well within the free tier for reads. Will probably have to leave it be as one of the mysteries of life :)