23 votes

Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous free tier?

7 comments

  1. [5]
    Weldawadyathink
    Link
    I really like Cloudflare's software stack. Workers was actually my intro to javascript development. I really like developing against Pages and Workers, and love Cloudflare's free tier offerings. I...

    I really like Cloudflare's software stack. Workers was actually my intro to javascript development. I really like developing against Pages and Workers, and love Cloudflare's free tier offerings. I developed a pinochle (card game) score keeping app that used Workers durable objects and web sockets to real time sync the game and round score between any browser in the world. It was a fun project, and a fantastic way to learn more about networking and javascript development.

    However all of that is supported by a cancerous sales team. There are some previous discussions here about Cloudflare's sales tactics. I doubt anything I would build would be the target of their sales pushes, but I cannot in good conscience support that sort of platform. Since the confirmations of the lies they are willing to make just for sales, I decided to move to new tools for development and hosting. I can heartily recommend deno deploy, which is the only other service I know of that uses javascript V8 isolates, and therefore has almost all the benefits of Workers, with all the benefits of Deno in addition.

    As you mention, there isn't really an alternative free static host that is comparable. All I can say is that if your website gets popular enough to stretch the limits of the alternatives, there is a very real chance that Cloudflare shakes you down for money and cancels your account if you don't pay. Unlimited almost never is actually unlimited, and Cloudflare has shown that their service definitely isn't unlimited.

    11 votes
    1. mattsayar
      Link Parent
      I thoroughly appreciate your optimism about my popularity, but I don't foresee this being a problem. jk jk I know you don't literally mean me. That said, vendor lock-in is a risk for everybody,...

      All I can say is that if your website gets popular enough to stretch the limits of the alternatives, there is a very real chance that Cloudflare shakes you down for money and cancels your account if you don't pay.

      I thoroughly appreciate your optimism about my popularity, but I don't foresee this being a problem. jk jk I know you don't literally mean me. That said, vendor lock-in is a risk for everybody, and in my case I have things hosted on GitHub which makes it portable to easily deploy to other static site hosts. I'll enjoy it while I can.

      4 votes
    2. ButteredToast
      Link Parent
      Those sales tactics have kept me using Netlify for static hosting for the time being (though I’ve seen reports of problematic behavior from them too). If my needs come to exceed their offerings I...

      Those sales tactics have kept me using Netlify for static hosting for the time being (though I’ve seen reports of problematic behavior from them too). If my needs come to exceed their offerings I think I’ll probably spin up a cheap VPS box running Caddy or even just plain old Nginx which should provide ample headroom.

      3 votes
    3. onceuponaban
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      My two cents is that while there are definitely much, much worse actors than Cloudflare out there, their position as a US company in charge of a massive segment of the Internet's backbone...

      My two cents is that while there are definitely much, much worse actors than Cloudflare out there, their position as a US company in charge of a massive segment of the Internet's backbone infrastructure is worrying and I'd prefer not to further contribute to my dependence on them by signing up for their services, especially the "free with an asterisk" type. Even without... let's just say current events in the US being a factor, all it takes is Cloudflare having a hiccup and vast swathes of the Internet get disrupted alongside it. Sure, they know what they're doing and are reliable a great majority of the time. But on the few occasions they aren't...

      2 votes
    4. ShroudedScribe
      Link Parent
      Do you have an example of their sales tactics that doesn't involve a certain online casino? That's the only story I keep seeing people talk about. As for them slimming their sales department......

      Do you have an example of their sales tactics that doesn't involve a certain online casino? That's the only story I keep seeing people talk about.

      As for them slimming their sales department... B2B sales is a brutal job. High-risk, high-reward I guess. I'd never do it, and the people who do are well aware that they have to meet quotas and potentially make the majority of their paycheck from commission. But that commission can be very lucrative if you're talented and lucky enough to get it.

      1 vote
  2. whs
    Link
    My company is on Cloudflare Enterprise, and from what I believe Pages is free for enterprise customers too. Apparently they might charge for the CI/CD, but since we bring our own CI/CD (no way...

    My company is on Cloudflare Enterprise, and from what I believe Pages is free for enterprise customers too. Apparently they might charge for the CI/CD, but since we bring our own CI/CD (no way they gonna clone code from internal repository) there's no chargeable axis.

    From what I can tell the entire sales team that I interact with are shielding the entire country from the internal revenue-focused sale teams. For example, they transferred my account off the team who speak my language to a new team that doesn't. And then the new team asked to meet our team online to "discuss my requirements". The previous team suggested that I should emailed to both teams to ask to be transferred back. After that they almost never upsell things that I don't need (other than renewal/support I don't think I ever talk to Cloudflare last year). The team told me that they created a new team specifically upsell existing customer, which is why my account was transferred. My account even have several paid features license that we used to pay lying around because they didn't bother writing the documents to remove the license from our accounts (not that we were depending on them anyway - more like indefinite PoC license).

    2 votes