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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

It's been hilarious watching competing companies publish warring blog posts declaring each other full of shit. I mean, I knew, but thanks for airing each others' dirty underpants.

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It's just Fastly's laundry. Fastly does not publish their pricing [1]. And, you need to contact a rep to sign up for commercial use [2], which implies everyone gets a different deal. Yet they claim contacting Cloudflare to do benchmarking means it's impossible for them to do a comparison,

> [FASTLY BLOG] it's impossible for us to define our own terms for a comparison because Cloudflare’s terms of use prohibit benchmarking of their services

>> [CLOUDFLARE TERMS] (f) perform or publish any benchmark tests or analyses relating to the Services without Cloudflare’s written consent;

That is not so different from Fastly's own sign-up process.

[1] https://www.fastly.com/pricing/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29468455

Most of cloudflare features are locked behind sales, powerpoints, and a couple meetings.

The question is "who shares more details on pricing", not "who has more unpriced features".

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

Out of curiosity, which features are you referring to? My impression (joined < 1 year ago) is that the vast majority of products are available to free customers (albeit with smaller limits perhaps) while the gap between self-service paid accounts and enterprise is smaller still.

My experience was with the UDP tunneling service and some general CDN stuff. Once you get past the published pricing then it’s sales calls and stuff like that.

Are you talking about Argo Tunnel or something else? Argo Tunnel was made free this year [1]. I don't think you even need a Cloudflare account. Also, I don't believe UDP by itself is supported yet (only QUIC & TCP) according to the github issue [2]. Is it possible there was a miscommunication. Our PMs love to talk to potential customers of products we're building so that we make sure we're building what you want & engaging with you when we have it ready as early beta users.

"General CDN stuff" is a bit too vague so I'm not really sure what you're referring to. I'm also not really sure what "get past the published pricing" means or how that relates to features being "locked" behind sales calls.

I'm sincerely trying to understand your experience and any suggestions you have to understand how I can push internally for us to be better and I appreciate your time in any responses you provide.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-your-next... [2] https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared/issues/215

Cloudflare spectrum was what it was, has to dig up the emails. They wanted me to sign a 1 year contract with commit levels which is kinda hard with a growing product I was working on. I wasn’t even able to predict 1 month out let-alone 12.

The off-the-shelf prices from Cloudflare are also negotiable for larger companies.

How is a sales deal same as a tech stack, I fail to see your point about fastly’s laundry?

Unlike cloudflare I dont think fastly is in business for solo devs but for enterprises. And each enterprise has its own requirements.

If fastly prefers to know customer requirements before they start using it or tailor them whats wrong?

Meanwhile cloudflare prevents its OWN EXISTSING customers from benchmarking, which is actually draconian.

It reminds me of being on Slashdot 15 years ago. We've even got one of the engineers posting in the comment thread, starting their own little flamewar. The names of the characters have changed, but there's still a bit of the same old Internet here.

The fact that a lead engineer and CEO took the time to respond here is clarity not a flamewar.

edit maybe I'm wrong,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29469174

I did say little flamewar. :)

I definitely started some sort of a flamewar but somehow not the one I was trying to start.

Most insightful comment here IMHO.

Vaguely reminiscent of the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars, I'd rather not buy from anyone involved

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