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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like they’re just using the wrong service. R2 is designed for object storage, and has 0 egress fees. That’d be the way to go. Not sure why the support engineer didn’t mention it. The standard cloudflare web caching probably doesn’t work well for this use case for whatever reason. The price is only 0.015/GB/mo, so the ~MB(?) of list would be served in perpetuity for less than a dollar.

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They're probably still getting many millions of requests a month so probably more than a dollar but even 20 million requests a month would only cost $3.60 (10 million free at first then 10 million @ $0.36/million)

I assume you probably know this but just wanting to share there are some pricing scales with R2 they're just pretty generous for a lot of things.

Elsewhere they say they are seeing 36 billion requests/month so that would be nearly $1,300 just for these access denides.

Actually, you're right. How would this work? Is Cloudflare really willing to foot the bill of 20 TB of bandwidth per day for a small text file that costs $0 to store?

Yes why not ? For reputation and attracting developers it seems to be worth it. If it costs 75K USD/year, that's already paid back with one big enterprise customer only.

Though, adblocking is a big business, many actors there are getting large revenue.

For example, Eyeo's income was 50 million USD per year last time I checked (and I guess most of it is actually profit), so they can find a solution if they really want.

Egress is free but not public i.e. you can't just give anyone an url. You have to use your own server to fetch content from R2 and then serve it to your visitors. Each fetch costs money but first 10 mil reads are free and your own server probably has egress fees.

No, egress is indeed public. Here's an example link, straight to R2:

https://img.phantasmagoria.me/img/96XJrjejoHNdrQv7.jpg

Even if you have a private bucket, you can give people a signed link with read access, for up to two weeks, IIRC.

Ah, I see they added public buckets last month

But it'll still cost them money by number of reads

Hm, yeah, true, you do need to pay for reads, you're right.

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