Curious: How does Cloudflare pay for the email routing network bandwidth + hosting charges it incurs for its free services? I ask because it seems Google ran this for a decade and then found out that it is time to charge for it.
This is the most common misconception about our business. Bandwidth, when you're small. But the scale economics in bandwidth are unlike almost anything else. As you get more and more bandwidth, the cost per bit drops until, in most places, it will go to zero. If you know those dynamics are present in a market, you can forward price knowing that you'll get to those scale advantages. Today, servicing a new free customer is virtually costless to us. So, to this college-bound customer and others, welcome.
We have a lot of bandwidth for our CDN and DDoS services.