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Comment by lgats | Hacker News Reader

Too bad it costs $5 + $0.10 per GB.

We provide a lot of value for free through our free service. Argo is an additional paid service that improves performance for customers that want to pay for that.

Your free service is nice - except that you can't use CF as a registrar for more than one domain without also having to pay for the proxying (even if there's no need). I'd gladly put all my eggs in one basket instead of having them spread out across five different registrars if that were fixed. Though maybe it's by-design?

Not sure I understand "pay for the proxying" - you should still be able to sign up your domains with the "free" plan as long as you use CF as your dns. If you don't want to proxy, your DNS records can be set to grey clouds so it just acts as a DNS service (but yes, you do have to be on Cloudflare's nameservers for now).

Are there any plans for allowing customers to use Cloudflare Registrar without Cloudflare DNS?

At this time we don't have any plans to open up the Registrar to domains not using Cloudflare's DNS. If that changes in the future we'll be sure to announce it.

Is there any benefit to having critical domains registered and DNSed at Cloudflare as opposed to using a separate registar w/ Cloudflare's DNS? The benefit of the latter is that one has optionality of DNS providers, and additionally one can use DNS providers that support zone export for secondary DNS.

One-click DNSSEC I guess.

There's only one domain allowed for free in the DNS/Proxying plan, there's no way I've seen to add more than one domain without being forced to buy the advanced plan?

That's not true. You have always been able to add as many domains for free to a plan as you want. I think there may be some coded limit in the thousands, but our support team can even waive that if you ask nicely.

Hmm, when Cloudflare registrar first came out I remember not being able to transfer just a domain name to CF without having to upgrade plans (or it was a dark pattern). Maybe I indeed have to recheck.

Hi Avamander - I'm the product manager for Cloudflare's Registrar. There is no limit on the number of domains that can be on the Cloudflare registrar for free accounts. You do however need to add the website first (from your dashboard home page). Once a new site has been added you can transfer the domain into the Registrar. Feel free to reach out to our support team and they can help walk you through it.

But when I have to add a new site I have to pay when I have more than one which basically makes it not-free to have more than one domain on a free account just for the registrar feature?

I see this and am reminded of when you guys raised the price for your pro plan from 5 to 20. How long until you get great adoption, followed by a 4x price increase?

We called that the 20-5-5 deal, and as someone that used Cloudflare and then went on to work there for a number of years, that is the only time I can remember Cf raising prices for something that had been fully released.

From my experience, features are added to the Enterprise offerings, and then eventually brought down to lower plan levels. However, most things are based on usage now, not plan level and I expect that is a better path to monetization for CF compared to simply raising prices.

What would you consider a fair per-GB price for Cloudflare to route data over their own private backbone (which I hastily assume includes their own leased fiber, routers/switch fabric, and other associated fixed and variable costs)?

I gladly pay $0.10/GB for some of my smaller, lower-bandwidth sites. For these sites, I see a latency improvement of around 25% for around 50% of (smart-routed) traffic.

For a couple of my larger sites (PDF and Image heavy), I am unable to justify the Argo cost. On these sites, over half of my monthly traffic is to bots (Googlebot, Bingbot, Yandex, etc). Traffic costs make up of around half of my hosting bill. A couple of things are keeping me from transitioning these sites to Argo: - I'd rather pay to speed up only real-users (not bots) - I'd rather not pay for traffic not routed over Argo (currently all traffic gets billed under Argo for enabled domains, not just the smart-routed traffic)

I currently pay the following rates from Google Cloud->CloudFlare (depending on the CF datacenter the data gets routed to). NA: $0.04/GB EU: $0.05/GB APAC: $0.06/GB

If I could pay a similar rate for a speedup (for only the Argo-routed traffic), I'd be more likely to sign up for Argo on all of my domains.

I think this is fair. Correlation between [website] performance and "customer happiness" (convert as you want) is pretty established. Also, I think workers and argo (both starting at ~$5/mo) is the right path of breaking down cloudflare cost from free/pro/business/enterprise to "pay as you go".

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