It's a totally reasonable thing for a person who is busy to "satisfice" on many priorities, vs. optimize. Maybe CloudFlare isn't optimal, but if I can get a price and sign up in minutes, and it's good enough, that might be the right choice. It's not just the time; it's that talking to a salesperson is usually psychologically draining. You'll never be able to pick up a phone and get a price in a few minutes; it's always "where is your business located", "x is the rep", "x will call you back", etc. It turns into a fiasco. You end up having CDN sales reps come to your office to meet with you to "understand your requirements". etc.
Punishing "old-school enterprise sales tactics" which try to keep price from being transparent is a reasonable choice. If you're a big content site, yes, you should go through the effort, but for someone who just wants a small service, buy from people who publish their prices.
CloudFlare isn't the only CDN which publishes pricing -- CloudFront with AWS is very transparent. Rackspace Cloudfiles is transparent. BitGravity is fairly transparent. Cachefly. etc.
Akamai is the worst at this, but Level3, CDNetworks, and Limelight don't publish pricing either.
Offering a free service like CF does is the genius of the freemium model -- even if your service is more expensive or less suitable at the high end, people who start out because it's free and easy will often stick with you as long as you're "good enough" as they grow.
I find it interesting that you bring up CloudFront, because they are also very expensive. As far as I can tell, because there are so many people of there who have a mental aversion to talking to another human and negotiating, they can charge an insane premium on an "engh" service.
Regardless, if picking up the phone and negotiating with a CDN, someone whose opinion of you is totally irrelevant and where the worst-case outcome is "we won't do business with you", how are you going to handle support on your own product, or court investors of your company?
Punishing "old-school enterprise sales tactics" which try to keep price from being transparent is a reasonable choice. If you're a big content site, yes, you should go through the effort, but for someone who just wants a small service, buy from people who publish their prices.
CloudFlare isn't the only CDN which publishes pricing -- CloudFront with AWS is very transparent. Rackspace Cloudfiles is transparent. BitGravity is fairly transparent. Cachefly. etc.
Akamai is the worst at this, but Level3, CDNetworks, and Limelight don't publish pricing either.
Offering a free service like CF does is the genius of the freemium model -- even if your service is more expensive or less suitable at the high end, people who start out because it's free and easy will often stick with you as long as you're "good enough" as they grow.