Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to parse or estimate. This is in stark contrast to the simple and straight-forward pricing with Cloudflare, which we pretty much prefer as a small dev shop. So much so that we choose to pay Cloudflare money to host our services even though we've got 5-digit AWS$ credits.
I'd always prefer paying for certainty than design a solution built on a lottery.
Using any "free" service is generally not free as you scale. That's the freemium model we live in today.
> Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth.
This is an unfortunate assumption with nothing to go on at this point. There is no more certainty with AWS, as implied in your statement, than with any other cloud provider. Not all organizations have an end goal in being the scale of AWS. And not all organizations put profit over product with respect to an outdated perspective that said organizations need to grow 40% YoY for all of eternity to be successful. It's now, more than ever, very clear that AWS profit margins on data transfer are egregious and they spin the backpedal as "Oh - look at us dropping prices, for you, our esteemed customer!". This is the real marketing slight of hand here, not the other way around.
I have been screwed, personally, by enough "free" and "unlimited" offerings to never believe them.
On AWS, all the price changes I've had have been to reduce my costs. This is over a pretty long period.
So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.
Google, sure, they could cancel or 3x your bill (hi Maps API customers etc). AWS does not have that history.
Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing. Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.
There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words.
Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn.
> So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.
I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS than with any other major cloud provider with respect to your statement about public companies who "eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth". And then for some reason you pivoted to your own, personal, AWS bill from there. I'm not exactly following the logic.
> Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing.
At this point I'm not sure if your comment is even serious. First of all, please elaborate on "secret pricing". Sounds like serious charges we should all be aware of. Maybe it's with the article from 2019 on The Register about domain pricing? That's not exactly in the context of this thread, but please enlighten the masses.
> Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.
I'd charge you with the same ask on AWS. You seem to imply the "free" tier, on AWS, will provide proper capabilities to host an adult content site. I have strong doubts about this. The logic of this argument is ill conceived at best. Or is your logic just that you can't do this on Cloudflare and that's the root of your argument on why AWS is better? Again, I'm not exactly following your train of thought.
[0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-compelling-economics-...
I'm still using free tier Google Apps in multiple places, even though they haven't offered new free accounts for about ten years now. They even still let you create new users for free in these legacy GApps.
Interestingly, I would likely migrate off of GApps to a different paid service if Google changed their minds, however I don't think they have a strong incentive to apply pressure here at long as Gmail.com accounts are free.
That's huge, Could you explain a bit more on how you achieve that? I've been exploring Cloudflare cache, AFAIK for anything not cached by default you need a special page rule e.g. for .html, I tried a wildcard domain.com/* and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Are you using workers to cache specific file types?
Yes: Using Workers as an api gateway and the Cache API as CDN.
[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...
