Cloudflare is raising prices and introducing annual plans

What I've wished for, as a free tier user with a few hobby/semi-professional sites that don't have high demands, is a consolidated plan (not billed per site) at a cheaper rate that provides some features (and expanded limits, such as page rules) in the Pro plan.

For me, the jump from $0 to $20 a month (which is becoming $25 soon) is huge! And this is a per-site charge! I don't spend that much on all my websites combined. At the same time, I'd prefer to pay for services that I value, and I like some of the innovative/different services from Cloudflare.

Perhaps once Cloudflare finds the business market to be saturated, it will focus on hobby players and tiny professional sites with better plans for that segment. Even community support may be enough for this segment. [1]

[1]: People who pay very less generally tend to complain more (than the ones who are paying a lot more) because of mismatched expectations and/or a sense of entitlement. Handling or weeding out this segment can be tricky.

It's rather impressive that they managed to go 12 years without a rate increase. But now that the fed's started everyone else must too.

I'm curious to see how cloud costs increase over the short to medium term, as many of the (e.g. snowflake) operated on the money burning growth model too. When companies infrastructure prices start going up significantly, they might start caring about wastage. I've seen many cases of hundreds of thousands saved just by turning off dev environments at night or simply changing which instance type a service is run on - and that's in small companies.

To be fair, their prices are dirt cheap and they offer a lot. Their product catalog is also growing nicely.

At some point I do wonder if the free plan (funded perhaps with VC money in the past) will need to change. Unmetered DDoS protection for free etc, there is a mismatch there in terms of cost to revenue. All the unlimited bandwidth places faded away at most other providers - or they end up with hidden charges. One complaint I have is folks talk about cloudflare's free pricing, but if you try to build dropbox using their free bandwidth they of course call you up, so it's not really unlimited free traffic - and I just end up liking places that are more clear / upfront on usage limits

Looks like a 20% increase for Pro and Business plans.

I guess the squeeze has begun.

Step 1: Take over the internet

Step 2: Raise prices

Step 3: Profit

This post would benefit from a summary at the top. It's hard to extract facts from all the fluff.

Shake down indy devs during an economic downturn and runaway inflation. Sounds legit.