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Comment by nixcraft | Hacker News Reader

Price is the main difference between AWS CloudFront/Fastly and CF. In most cases, CF prices are fixed, like $200 for business or $20 for the pro plan. If you like fixed prices VMs from Linode or DO, chances are high that you will like Cloudflare too. Of course, advanced addons features like CF Argo and CF Bot management cost more money at Cloudflare too.

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Using CF as an initialism for Cloudflare when talking about CloudFront and Cloudflare is really confusing -- especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.

> especially because Cloudflare doesn't capitalize the F but CloudFront does.

They used to: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare (2016), https://archive.is/v1C1H

These initialisms are getting out of hand, to be honest.

CF vs. Cf

I think you mean “CF? c.f. Cf.”

Can't believe I didn't think of that.

- Last I checked, the $20 plan has no SLA whatsoever and the $200 has a pretty poor one. Thought admittedly I don't know whether Cloudfront is better there.

- You can't serve all kinds of traffic with Cloudflare self-serve plans. Including some of the ones that tend to use the most bandwidth.

- According to the CloudFlare self-serve plan TOS, IIRC, if you start being a too-heavy user on the those plans CloudFlare can (and, I've heard, will) tell you to upgrade to an enterprise plan. Last I checked (this part's personal experience) they're not super interested in serving enterprise customers very far under a minimum $5k/month level, so there's a huge gap there in which other services are a much, much better value.

I have a small service for an nfp on the $20 plan and I remember working out cloudfront+aws was would have set them back roughly 1500 per month, and that's without looking into occasional viral traffic spikes. The price disparity is baffling.

It makes sense if you consider the fact that one complaint is printing money while the other is bleeding it.

While that lasts, you can't be charging a flat $200 in a world where the other players are charging 5-10¢/GB of egress.

I said the opposite ("cloud providers can't keep charging 5-10¢/GB egress") a few years ago, but I guess I was wrong. I still think their pricing is absolutely insane in a world where even the smallest companies can colo a server and get wholesale transit that works out to <$0.005/GB.

But I guess nobody's really pushing traffic so nobody cares about $/GB.

> I still think their pricing is absolutely insane in a world where even the smallest companies can colo a server and get wholesale transit that works out to <$0.005/GB.

Their pricing's insane in a world where you can get prices not too far from that wholesale rate for CDN service (which is a whole different beast from having one or two colo'd servers).

And anyway, nobody pushing serious bits is paying public rates, anywhere. Those discounts can be huge. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason cloud providers have such high rates is so they can give their counterparts an easy, very impressive-looking "win" in negotiations.

Yeah I was going to say much the same. Nobody with a large cloud bill is paying anywhere near list price. It's very hard to compare services apples to apples without actually getting a private quote from each side's sales team unfortunately.

This applies to all "enterprise software" too, btw. We've had quotes from vendors that started at 50% off list price, and then negotiated down further from there. It's pretty ridiculous.

Erm... why not? Everyone knows cloud providers are gouging customers on egress bandwidth fees, it's great that someone bucks the trend and calls them out on it.

Alot of the companies who bought cloudflare would probably rather pay the 200$ than deal with migrating everything.

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