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Comment by Andoryuuta | Hacker News Reader

There are multiple competitors though.

See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on.

People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.

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Cloudflare has easiest usability and generous free tier

And yet it still has competitors.

Free tiers are probably one of the most damaging practices for competition in the market for cloud services

Weird take. I might try all the services with free tiers, see which one works the best, and give that service my business in the long term. Like, how else to evaluate competing vendors? If there’s no free tier it means everything I want to try requires I wade through “sales motion”, and I’ll end up picking conservatively based on reputation because it’s harder/more annoying to evaluate multiple vendors. That seems less competitive - “no one got fired for buying IBM” attitude.

There's a difference between free tiers and trials. A trial is fine, but the unlimited free tiers offered now are a part of a race to the bottom that make it so only the largest, most investor-backed companies and loss-leaders can effectively compete.

Sure, it’s great from the consumer perspective in the short run. But how much does needing a free tier to attract customers raise the barrier to entry for the market? The only companies that can compete are those with existing infrastructure and revenue streams that can subsidize their losses. Even ZIRP couldn’t counteract that. There is a reason that predatory pricing is illegal.

Would strongly recommend Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”

This. They caught me when they started offering decent DNS UI, held me when they gave me one-click SSL, and sealed the deal when they let me buy domains at cost.

I don't care what AWS offers because there's no way I'm venturing into that for my simple domains.

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