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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why they don’t just have clear limits - seems like it would make it easier to grok.

I think it being difficult to grok is the point, if they laid down exactly how much they want you to pay for bandwidth then it would be easy to go price shopping between them and the competition. But when it's "free" bandwidth, with a fuzzy line where it stops being free, and ambiguous pricing when it does, they can hook people in with a great deal and try to shake them down later.

I still encounter people who refuse to believe that CF bandwidth isn't really free, when you can easily demonstrate that it's not by just observing who uses them. If their bandwidth truly was free and unlimited with no catch whatsoever then every bandwidth giant like Imgur would use CF, but they don't. Imgur uses Fastly, probably because it's cheaper than CFs "free".

Yeah our pretty large company switched to CloudFlare thinking of all the dollars they would save with little research but within a year were back at Akamai.

And Akamai is very expensive.

Free hits obscuring ruinous costs is a time honored strategy of drug dealers and all kinds of shady businesses.

I suspect this is the answer, and it's just "momentum". once you're at a location and you're doing considerable "stuff" the move becomes painful and $200 more a month doesn't seem a lot if you're a company, but if they do that every 6 months or so before you know it's $1000 a month

I think an order of magnitude more is not unusual. OP was being asked to pay $120K a year.

Presumably it gives them a lot more flexibility in deciding who has to pay more.

With published thresholds they’re less able to upsell someone just shy of the limit without publicly changing the tiers. Doing that has the potential to upset existing customers who are over the new limit all at once, while also providing intel to competitors looking to undercut them.

They don't want you to know where you are. It's like Kafka but the liberterian edition.

That's not how the "free until it's not" pricing model works :P

IMHO it's just the price finding model that CF has adopted, I expect in the future they'll release limit numbers... unless they decide not releasing numbers is more profitable (i.e. the used car sales pricing model)

Genuine question: Why did you use `grok` in that context?

You're on a site named hacker news; why would you expect any other word there?

Are you also weirdly angry that Musk used the term for their “he has one so I also must have one” LLM? *Stole* the term? That’s a special word, and out of the mouth of anyone but Valentine Michael is obscenity.

Under what contexts are you familiar with the term grok?

or don't feel like using an online dictionary when it's quicker than typing a question especially when you take feedback time into consideration. I just don't grok why anyone would do that.

I feel that you didn’t take the time to understand the question and keyboard warriored an irritated response instead.

Nonetheless, have a wonderful Sunday evening!

Rule: whenever someone prefaces a question with “genuine question” it’s actually a troll.

Also here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

> Rule: whenever someone prefaces a question with “genuine question” it’s actually a troll

That’s a very cynical take.

... in what other contexts would you use the word "grok"?

> ... in what other contexts would you use the word "grok"?

My understanding: When complex knowledge is absorbed through deep immersion.

I was surprised to see to grok as a synonym for (? a possibly very superficial flavour of) to understand.

Would have loved to know why, from a linguistic perspective, GP used that word in this context.

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