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Comment by MattIPv4 | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare's R2 costs $0.36 per million read operations (after the 10 million you get for free) [1]. Vercel is wrapping R2 and is charging $2 per million reads [2]. They're also charging $0.15/GB for egress (after the 1GB you get free), when R2 charges nothing, and the storage cost is doubled from $0.015/GB on R2 to $0.03/GB on Vercel. That's quite the cost increase for the DX improvement.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/

[2] https://vercel.com/docs/storage/vercel-blob/usage-and-pricin...

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Does this mean I have to potentially deal with two vendors when there is an outage? Awesome!

That's their secret, Cap. You've always had to deal with multiple vendors when there's an outage. Vercel has never made it a secret that they're standing on the shoulders of Tier 1 Cloud giants for their hosting backend.

I only just read https://vercel.com/blog/framework-defined-infrastructure

To me, the storage announcement + this blog really helped contextualize where Vercel sits. And I really like this approach. It’s what I’d want to build on. I love the partnerships with cos out of their core expertise like Neon, and existing integrations with supabase, planetscale, etc

I think its a fair assumption that any massive AWS or similar scale company infra outage is going to knock out a good portion of your SaaS and multiple parts of the web

This isn't finalized yet, apologies for the confusion. We'll be updating the pricing for Blob shortly (it's in private beta and invite only). The pricing for KV and Postgres is up to date.

I already lean away from S3/Azureblob/etc because their egress prices are terrible. .15/GB is borderline criminal.

150$ for a TB traffic?! Wtf

What’s happening right now is a story we’ve seen plenty of times before. Overhead cost of convenience mixed with vendor lock-in, all while boasting about open source.

I’d love to create tools that were convenient and had fair pricing. The challenge is that you’re trying to grow into a market with worse acquisition economics. Tough to win if winning is the goal. If anyone has a solution reach out. XD

Our egress bill from Cloudfront last month, inc. the 1TB/per region free tier, was nearly $2,000. That's egress traffic ALONE (~20TB of it).

Needlessly to say, we're wrapping up testing on migrating our production (public) buckets to Cloudflare (R2) taking our cost from those $2,000 (and going up every month), to (drum roll)... $0,000/mo.

Have I mentioned AWS egress charges are borderline "extortionary"? :X

What's a cheaper alternative that is of similar quality?

Backblaze is $0.01/GB egress and $0.005/GB/Month storage.

I am currently developing an option that offers identical quality and features but at a significantly lower cost. Unfortunately, you will have to wait for approximately a year until I complete the development process. However, I believe that the wait will be worth it, and you will be pleased with the outcome.

If you have a relationship with an account manager, talk to them. There are options for better rates.

Why not remove the pricing table or add a note about that then? It’s not great having it there if it’s incorrect, especially after an announcement.

You will get better customer support from Vercel. Cloudflare gives almost zero customer support if you are pay-as-you-go plan.

For what it’s worth when I was TL I would regularly hang out on discord and answer questions for R2. I believe the team still does that and the community itself also answers a lot of questions. Now that I TL Workers KV I do the same in that chat room.

There’s also the community forums although I find it’s harder to stay on top of those personally.

Not trying to say our paygo support is as good. Just saying for those customers, I do personally try to offer ENT-level support as an entire class of users (ie all paygo = 1 ent to me for the products I personally support)

The Cloudflare Discord is where it's at.

Can vouch for this. The Discord support, aside from specific account/platform problems, has been most helpful and super friendly, both community members and staff.

Good information. I think active community forums are essential for success of all companies and products. Cloudflare has built this up well. Though Customer support issues should be not be left without response for days or weeks, until community moderators use back-channels to get support ticket resolved. The question was why is Vercel worth paying more for, and customer support is probably one of those reasons.

The secret to great customer support from Cloudflare is to drop into their Discord and join the channel of the product / service you're having trouble with

Most of the engineers and product leaders on the teams that make the services check those channels daily and jump into help where they can. There's also a huge community of power users there called Community Champions who help out as well.

> The secret to great customer support from Cloudflare

I wish this never had to be said, it shouldn't be a secret.

That may be true but how much power does Vercel CS have to help if the issue is fundamentally on the Cloudflare side?

> That's quite the cost increase for the DX improvement.

It depends how much you spend on egress vs developers.

Hijacking this comment to ask if anyone has had luck integrating Cloudflare R2 with Pleroma.

I’ve not had any luck getting it to work though I’m also not well versed on the terminology.

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