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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like they made it free for customers for up to 500 domains. It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?

>So, we’ve eliminated DNS query fees entirely.

> Bunny DNS no longer charges for DNS queries and includes free DNS hosting for up to 500 domains per account. There are no query limits, no per-request billing, and no critical features hidden behind enterprise plans. (Yes, that includes smart records and health monitoring too.)

>As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.

Oh..kayy.

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They were charging for nameserver hosting. The main draw are some advanced programmatic features for (geo) routing, scripting, etc.

> It also sounds like they were charging for DNS resolution before? Or is it DNS hosting?

High end DNS hosting is often billed around the number of queries, number of zones, and number of records, number of special names with fancy features, etc. If you're switching from other DNS hosting, you might not even know what the query volume is, so that's kind of exciting when you need to make a switch.

If you were paying per query and the cost was too high, raising TTLs and consolidating services onto fewer hostnames are pretty achievable ways to reduce the query volume, so it is something you have some control over.

The one dollar thing isn’t as bad in practice as it sounds since it covers everything. Basically invoice minimum across everything so if you’re using the platform in any meaningful way it’s a non issue

It is bad, because I don't use Bunny for anything else and so this made it paid DNS for me, so when I was migrating DNS a few months ago it made me rule them out.

The 1 dollar thing, I think, looks exceptionally bad because it shows that what Bunny says can't be taken at face value.

The fact is we're here because they posted a blog talking about how great they are making DNS free "because a faster internet won’t build itself".

But now I've just learnt from comments on HN that Bunny DNS isn't free.

They've lost my trust before they even had it.

Besides $1 means you need to give them your credit card from day one. That's probably the only reason they have that minimum limit to begin with.

KYC is a thing in Europe. Internet infrastructure businesses won't do business anonymously as they'd be held liable for anything their anonymous customer did.

Most European hosting providers don't KYC. Infrastructure providers are rarely held liable for customer actions in Europe. Most enforcement around this sort of thing is around sanctions violations (Stark Industries).

Isn't mullvad european?

Yes, but nobody is by default held liable for their anonymous customers. Otherwise you would not be able to buy anything with cash any more.

In Sweden you can't. Mullvad is an unusual exception. Sweden is full cashless.

You don't need a credit card on file, you can prepay and use that balance instead.

I'll also say that I've used around 140 gigs of bandwidth the last two months and my costs has only been <$2. Worth it to me, and doubly worth it to avoid the tyranny of big tech (which includes cloudflare).

Yeah I ruled them out months ago because it was $1, I saw this post and was about to reconsider them and in my case it's the same as it was.

Huh?

It literally explains this in the blog post

> As with all bunny.net services, accounts using the platform are subject to our standard $1/month minimum spend, but DNS itself no longer incurs any usage-based charges.

Sure seems like you’re trying very hard to find a problem here.

If you’re not down with their prepaid/$1 model there is always CF.

No, this is just a silly take.

AWS can make data export free, and no-one's going to shout at them that it's not free because it cost money to store the data there in the first place.

Bunny offers a number of services to paying customers. One of the services, that would previously have incurred a cost, now does not. It is free.

Their DNS is also scriptable, it’s not just a name server

You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.

I'm glad to hear the queries are free now! I somehow managed to blow through the free quota, not by like a crazy amount but enough that I started thinking in most circumstances why pay extra for basic dns when registrar's is free? Even barely used domains were getting tons of queries. And I only need the fancy failover feature on a couple domains, though it is nice for those for sure. Anyway with this I don't have to worry about it anymore, so thanks Bunny!

First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.

Aws charges for everything including that.

route53 charge somewhere in the region of $0.40 per million queries

Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)

I wanted to give Cloudflare a go, but I did not want to move my whole domain. Unfortunately you can only host a subdomain with a paid account.

You only have to have them be your domain's name servers. Domains can stay at another registrar. This is pretty risk-free. They didn't even used to be a registrar until recently and they don't support registering all tlds so this always worked.

You are missing the point. I do not want delegate the root of my domain. I want to delegate a subdomain, which is not possible without a paid account. Not to be confused with the registrar.

I just saw this. You're right I thought you were just concerned about giving control of your domain to cloudflare.

something something are the product

Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.

I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.

It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.

Cloudflare's business model was to protect DDoS "providers"/booters for free, so DDoS became something everyone had to worry about (before cloudflare they tended to DDoS eachother), and then sell the cure.

Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.

Move up a tier or move somewhere where it costs even more. That seems kinda reasonable, really.

CloudFlare uses that Slack Hack Club model?

Not _quite_ in this case, since the free plan improves everyone's experience: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

Well except of the people that may solve the damn captchas (:

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