Get nerds in now with cool cheaper stuff, later when they're enterprise level decision makers Cloudflare is burned into their brain as the go-to

Of course the other angle is that Cloudflare one day ends up like Google, who ended up like Microsoft, who ended up like IBM

As for right now though, cooooool

It certainly ain't free or cheap if you are running a real business with real traffic and real customers.

However, still totally worth it, easily. Just saying they have a healthy B2B business model.