For standard, legal web traffic Cloudflare will always be free. If you’re using us for just that and anyone on our sales team ever pressures you to upgrade, email me because it’s an explicit violation of our policies. Sales people are humans, so sometimes they make mistakes, but I can set it straight. Here’s my email:

matthewatcloudflaredotcom

So what are the cases you may have read about. They fall into two big buckets:

1. Streaming Video

A video stream is just a series of image files strung together. So some people have tried to use our free service to serve video. This causes two problems. First, a second of video is often as much as 10x the bandwidth as a typical web page load. We’ve done a lot to make bandwidth costs low, but it can add up fast.

Second, the people who tend to do this sort of janky video streaming are often streaming pirated video content. When that happens and we don’t shut it down we get sued. That’s costly.

We do offer a service to stream video. It’s creatively named Stream. It’s elegant and not janky and designed to be the least costly way to stream video content. It’s cheap but it’s not free.

2. Illegal Content

The site that is in the link you referenced was serving a gambling site to a jurisdiction where gambling is illegal. The problem was, the jurisdiction retaliated by blocking their IPs. If that only blocked the one gambling site, that’s their problem. But we share IPs between customers on our low end plans. So if a customer does something illegal somewhere and it causes an IP to get blocked then it causes harm to a bunch of other customers.

The solution is dedicated IP addresses. In a case like this we have a product called BYOIP (which is exactly what you think it is). It’s bespoke and expensive for us to maintain and customers who care about it tend to be customers who have budgets to pay for it, so it’s expensive. We could probably invest engineering resources to make it less bespoke, but there’s really not a ton of demand.

This customer was doing something illegal somewhere according to some government. We said — no judgment — but you’re getting our IPs banned and causing harm to other customers and we can’t let that happen. We presented a solution (albeit an expensive one). They balked and wrote a blog post. And now people assume there’s a bait-and-switch sales strategy. There’s not. Turns out people who use our Free plan rarely turn into million dollar customers. And people who are million dollar customers don’t really even consider our Free plan. So the world generally sorts itself correctly.

We get stymied by our policy of not talking about the details of customers without their permission, so it makes it hard to respond to blog posts like that one. But enough people have asked me about it and I’m tired enough about it that I’m going to make the decision to revise the policy: we won’t publicly disclose any details about a customer without their permission; but if you write a blog post complaining about us and leave out the salient details, then we’ll reserve the right to fill those details in.

Anyway, in 99.99% of cases, and especially if you’re not janky streaming or doing something illegal, our Free plan will work great for you and you’ll never hear from anyone on our Sales team.

> But from quick googling (I think it's Reddit), some people said Cloudflare uses bait-and-switch where at some point you will need certain features that are only available in enterprise plan or something, basically significant cost increase.

Cloudflare is only "free" for hosting websites; doing something like hosting just images or binary data and pushing hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes a month is likely to get your domain dropped from Cloudflare [0]. However, they do allow these non-website use cases (like hosting binary files, tons of images, etc) when using their third party products like R2 and/or Workers.

But, even with those stipulation, they do have a somewhat dubious sales tactic where, if you're pushing a lot of data, they:

- send you an email saying "you're using a lot of data"

- Have a line threatening you to "pay us to safeguard your website from potential suspension or restricted access"

- If you don't pay, you're in limbo on whether or not you're actually violating T&S and should make plans for being dropped by CF

Going over X0 TB/mo seems to be the threshold for getting put in this sales funnel, based on the few instances i've seen, but I can't confirm it. In some of these cases, the accounts survived, and in others they were dropped, so this isn't always a death sentence.

I would be incredibly grateful if Matthew Prince / eastdakota commented on this sales tactic, because it's obvious that some sales EVP at some point in time said "When Trust & Safety flags a customer for bandwidth reasons, we need to try to upsell them before T&S can review and make a determination for the account", which seems incredibly bad manners with how often CF speaks about their anti-"bandwidth rent seeking" philosophy[1].

0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi...

1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress

it's only a bait and switch if you pay for something that they then pull out from under you. this is just called a free trial