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Comment by 8by3 | Hacker News Reader

When someone says cloudflare is too good / cheap to be true... maybe think about it.

They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.

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There are lots of companies that provide low end services for free to attract people who may now or in the future be decision makers at large companies.

For better or worse, the free plan that Cloudflare has provided me for 10 years for my 20-30 hobby/personal domains has gotten them several hundred thousand dollars in business.

indeed, typically by using their huge cash piles to build a moat around them, so no small new player has a dream of competing.

This is why I refuse to give any money to AWS/GCP/Azure or anyone who runs on them.

You should avoid giving them money because they're 50 times more expensive than the competition, not because of that.

I'm pretty sure that's impossible nowadays, at least avoiding everything that runs on AWS.

I'm pretty sure it's not really any different from a protection scheme that turns into vendor lock in.

> They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.

If it is "not obvious to you how they extract the value", you can just look for NET (their ticker) earning reports and SEC fillings since they are a publicly traded company instead of spreading conspiracy theories...

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