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Comment by licomo | Hacker News Reader

OT, but this is why I am skeptical of Cloudflare right now. Am I right to be concerned?

Cloudflare covers this in their terms of service:

    Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)

    Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.

In other words, if you serve HTML / CSS / JS you'll be fine. Too much of anything else and at some point they will ask you to pay.

I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)

R2 has similarly misaligned pricing, and I don't think it comes with comparable ToS limitations: You pay per request, and not proportional to data egress. So theoretically you could use it to distribute huge files very cheaply. Assuming there is no maximum request duration, it could even be used with a long running connection to download a video as it's being watched.

This is the part I don't like

> if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files

Lots of sites have images. When exactly can I start to expect paying? Will this unspoken limit change in the future? Will I be notified when it is? As-written, it doesn't seem that way since it's opaque.

Why do you think CF owe you an explanation of when you start paying? You're not paying them; they don't owe you anything.

I imagine it pretty much comes down to "did this one thing that an individual is free hosting suddenly become popular or are they constantly taking the piss/running a biz off free".

CF has a free plan and paid plans. There's a fuzzy line in between. I would like to know when I would be transitioned to a paid plan.

They have an internal metric - I just wish it was public. How can I make a business decision on cost without this?

Yes. They will flip on their customers sooner or later. It might be years. And so long as you are prepared to bail when the time comes, you may as well keep taking advantage. But if it's critical infrastructure, make sure you have a failover plan ready.

you're only skeptical of CF now? They've been garbage for years in terms of service and support

It has just seemed like people are big fans of the "free, unlimited" plans here. I use a provider that is pay-per-usage personally, which seems more sustainable.

Support is part of the cost that is rolled into that pay-per-usage fee IMO.

I've worked at multiple places that unfortunately paid for CF services (and support), and have consistently had trouble with them. And that doesn't include just general CF service instability for end users.

Ditto. We got locked into a long-term Cloudflare contract and regretted it immensely. So much stuff that’s beta quality, broken promises, terrible support. Looks great on the surface, until you need to actually rely upon it.

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