I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers. Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewhere of high bandwidth users being cajoled into upgrades.
For an honest bandwidth offer, I'd much sooner consider Fly.io rather than Cloudflare. At least with Fly their true pricing is transparent
We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it.
Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to parse or estimate. This is in stark contrast to the simple and straight-forward pricing with Cloudflare, which we pretty much prefer as a small dev shop. So much so that we choose to pay Cloudflare money to host our services even though we've got 5-digit AWS$ credits.
The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget. In my experience it always makes sense to consider the latter. At some point that $595/mo. you're saving will appear on a lead sheet, whether it happens today or (similar to e.g. Google Apps) after 5 years. Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth.
I'd always prefer paying for certainty than design a solution built on a lottery.
> The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget.
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 really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples.
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.
> I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples.
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.
Let's be crystal crystal clear here. If I host a high data use video site on AWS, I can calculate what my costs will be. That provides me some certainty with respect to a business plan. Even better, AWS does have a history that is much better than others in terms of pricing stability. This doesn't mean best price.
Can you say the same about cloudflare? No.
Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable history of screwing customers.
AWS is offering clear pricing, cloudflare is not. It's really that simple.
This makes me realize that folks just don't understand the value AWS is providing, and is perhaps why they can charge such insane prices.
People with actual money to spend don't want "free" because they don't believe it's actually free.
In terms of cloudflare, they have something like a negative 60% operating margin. The idea of building a business on a company with a negative 60%+ operating margin is insane, either they will go bust or have to raise prices.
AWS by contrast makes money. Because of this, they can shave a point or two off margin to give (another) price reduction.
1TB per month cloudfront, 2M cloudfront functions etc etc. They are under almost NO financial pressure to raise rates.
Cloudflare is under pressure or will be. With VC money perhaps they will get a longer runway.
It is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how, just because Amazon's price model has been reliable, that it must be a viable cost because people pay it. It's unfortunate that the reality you're basing this comment on is so far off base that you've convinced yourself AWS egress fees are somehow "stable". It's also very interesting that you're stating Cloudflare is under some unforeseen "pressure" because they're not turning a profit today. I would gather you're assuming Cloudflare is being soaked by infrastructure costs, which is completely incorrect, as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market by investing in their field (sales) and continually reinvesting in R&D.
It's also fantastic to read the misconceptions of the "value" AWS is providing. In some cases they do provide a much greater value over cost ratio, but if you've convinced yourself that blindly for AWS proper as a whole - boy do I feel for you the day you realize the economic advantage they manipulate to monopolize the cloud market, and not for the greater good of their customers.
Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again - his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear. It's laughable that anyone would publicly make that statement at this point in time knowing what we know. Sure, if you're running a static site on S3 for a few users a month I'm sure you've got it covered. For those of us dealing with large scale enterprise everything stated here is, at best, bending the truth and at worst flat out ignorance.
> his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear
Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.
Many of Corey's technical posts are around finding sweet technical substitutes for niche use cases, but as I'm sure he'll tell you, 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.
> as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market
Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like. One of the reasons this may not have happened yet is because Cloudflare's whole presentation is consumer oriented, starting with domain configuration management that is hell to version correctly when 20 people have access to the account. Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.
> Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.
Nobody is actively encouraging the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought. This makes zero sense. Why would an organization pay a business to reduce their AWS costs if it wasn't worth the cost to realize the savings? Cost optimization is an easy task, as you've stated - so the cost/value proposition of a business like The Duckbill Group must not be worth it according to your statement. Yet they exist and do, seemingly, well. Maybe... Just maybe, cost optimization in AWS is not easy, not straightforward, and designed to be painful enough to where smart engineers are incented to leverage Amazon's dark patterns of hiding costs at time of deployment.
You even state...
> 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.
So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy? Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?
> Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like.
Let's take a stroll back in time. Do you think that Amazon and AWS have always posted a profit? Go look, they've posted many quarterly losses to get where they're at. That's how it works as you build a business like that. To your point - AWS does compete directly with Cloudflare in certain products, yet here we are, Cloudflare and AWS both continue to grow (negative operating income / net income are not a direct correlation of company growth BTW). A mistake you've made is around brand and reputation. Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company. Customers continue to buy Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler and, yes, Cloudflare - even though AWS offers some overlapping portfolio. Why? AWS isn't viewed as a security portfolio. Cloudflare has brand reputation in security and content distribution. And it's a pivot that easily works with both their brand and reputation.
> Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.
This just screams of the competitive argument low-road. I don't have ties to Amazon or AWS. I'm not an employee. When I read statements like this it's affirmation that there's some agenda. I laughed out loud reading that as the closing argument, thanks for that.
> So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy?
Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.
> Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?
Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.
> Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company
They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government. CloudFlare on the other hand, to this day, default to MITMing SSL connections for new accounts and downgrading them to cleartext en route to the back end. It seems our perceptions differ wildly.
> Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.
You make valid points, but what you're missing is the same accusations you level at Cloudflare were once leveled at AWS (which is why AWS had virtually no credible competition from Y!, MSFT, GOOG for 7 years!).
Also, Cloudflare's moat isn't 0ms cold-starts, but their persistence in commoditising bandwidth. Think Amazon Prime free 2-day shipping and how that worked out...
> Limited IO bandwidth in middle and upper management alongside difficult schedules (we covered that one already). Take 2 steps above engineer on an org chart and detail becomes invisible, the vast majority of tasks begin to resemble a teenager at a mall with their dad's credit card. Meaningful technical validation phases are almost unheard of in many organizations, and largely antithetical to agile.
I'm sorry, but what are you trying to say? "Antithetical to agile" - is there a point beyond some non-nonsensical, made up scenario? Every major organization with a cloud budget cares about optimization today at some level. This hasn't changed in over 20 years because those budget dollars used to be directed at data center costs. Now they're more fluid and can be more impactful when people make mistakes or aren't making sure to optimize up front.
> Because they market to folk who never take the time to model comparative costs. In any project I considered them for (3 I think, <$15k/year each), Digital Ocean was significantly more expensive than AWS. I follow my spreadsheets, the industry follows marketing.
Then share some examples from said "spreadsheets". Because for straight instance pricing DO beats AWS pricing in most every way. This is one of a handful of bread and butter services AWS offers (lift and shift compute). DO also does, most often, better with respect to performance (CPU/compute) when comparing directly [0][1][2][3]. This calculator [4] at DO showcases cost comparisons across all major cloud vendors and I've validated comparison in the last month with AWS - the prices check out.
> They're the only vendor I deal with who are on first name terms with the NSA and sell in tremendous quantities to the US government.
This is a rather naive comment. I happen to work in the security industry and every cloud vendor has direct ties to 3 letter agencies - that's not at all unique to AWS. Sorry to burst your bubble, but also every notable security player in the industry has similar relationships. It's not unique. It's also more advantageous for the three letter agencies in many of those relationships. Also, AWS, along with everyone else - has relationships in security information sharing for verticals. So, yes, AWS is part of FS-ISAC, as one example. Just. Like. Everyone. Else.
I'm saying this is my bread and butter, and I've seen the same pattern in every company I've crossed the doors of. It's no made up scenario when a team of contractors have spent 12 months building out some service, not a single person will have given a damn about costs, so cost optimization is purchased separately. The contractors aren't wrong nor is the business wrong, nor is this pattern unique to cloud spend.
> I happen to work in the security industry
Then surely you will understand how an entire subindustry can exist to mop up after engineers who could otherwise 'simply' avoid most mistakes if they just spent more time Googling.
> Then surely you will understand how an entire subindustry can exist to mop up after engineers who could otherwise 'simply' avoid most mistakes if they just spent more time Googling.
Yes, I'm sure an entire $50 billion dollar industry comes down to, like all your arguments, just lazy people and the simple fix is "Googling".
"It is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how"
If you don't think AWS bandwidth pricing is something in the real world I don't know what to say :) AWS is now broken out in Amazon financials - worth a look to see what they are raking in and the margins they are getting in the real world :)
"Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again"
His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public. For a service like cloudflare (ie, call for pricing / dealing with a salesperson trying to figure out how much they can squeeze you for on upfront or on renewal) this type of service is much harder.
In short, if your bill is too high, you can talk to someone like Corey and they can probably help you bring it down.
> If you don't think AWS bandwidth pricing is something in the real world I don't know what to say :) AWS is now broken out in Amazon financials - worth a look to see what they are raking in and the margins they are getting in the real world :)
This comment confirms that you have a misunderstanding of how organizations can and have bought bandwidth via high-cap Internet offerings in the real world given how you've misunderstood my argument completely. My point is that organizations like AWS, Cloudflare, GCP, and many, many organizations around the world still buy Internet connectivity this way (directly). My unchanged statement, all along, has been regarding the egregious margins AWS makes on bandwidth that they charge for in a very asymmetric and oversubscribed manner. It's hard to have an conversation about these things when the basis for how businesses operate aren't understood by those making comments, unfortunately.
> His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public.
I'm not sure how many enterprise agreements you've helped derive or review, but you can get agreed pricing from any cloud vendor - Cloudflare included. If you're spending any amount monthly beyond what appears to be a personal account this is not your issue.
Google Apps is likely a poor example of your point. All the people who were using the free tier were never forced to paid plans.
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.
> We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it.
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?
Interesting. Can you be more specific? Is it possible those prices are conflating different services, e.g. CDN vs network tunnels vs video streaming vs workers vs Pages vs object storage egress?
Even within just the CDN category, Cloudflare does a lot with its basic CDN offering (bot blocking, transformations, dynamic caching, etc.) that other vendors may charge as separate options.
That's not to say I don't believe you, I just wanted to make sure it's apples to apples.
Cloudflare's pricing model only really makes sense, IMO, if you're either a small/med business (which makes it an incredible deal) or if you're working cloud-native using their edge functions (workers, pages, etc.). If you're primarily using them to shield and proxy a LAMP monolith or similar for a large number of users, yeah, I can see how that would get expensive really quickly. There are other vendors who specialize only in that, being a dumb CDN. Cloudflare's value is that they enable completely new architectures based on their network topology... you can't easily do something like that on Fastly, for example.
For an honest bandwidth offer, I'd much sooner consider Fly.io rather than Cloudflare. At least with Fly their true pricing is transparent
edit: speaking of transparency, https://imgur.com/HnlWFUe