Comment by mdasen

Comment by mdasen 3 days ago

45 replies

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I think there are a few other benefits (even if that was the main benefit/driving force behind the decision).

When you have low-paying (or zero-paying) customers, you need to make your system easy. When you're enterprise-only, you can pay for stuff like dedicated support reps. A company is paying you $1M+/year and you hire someone at $75,000 who is dedicated to a few clients. Anything that's confusing is just "Oh, put in a chat to Joe." It isn't the typical support experience: it's someone that knows you and your usage of the system. By contrast, Cloudflare had to make sure that its system was easy enough to use that free customers would be able to easily (cheaply) make sense of it. Even if you're going to give enterprise customers white-glove service, it's always nice for them when systems are easy and pleasant to use.

When you're carrying so much free traffic, you have to be efficient. It pushes you to actually make systems that can handle scale and diverse situations without just throwing money at the problem. It's easy for companies to get bloated/lazy when they're fat off enterprise contracts - and that isn't a good recipe for long-term success.

Finally, it's a good way to get mindshare. I used Cloudflare for years just proxying my personal blog that got very little traffic. When my employer was thinking about switching CDNs, myself and others who had used Cloudflare personally kinda pushed the "we should really be looking at Cloudflare." Free customers may never give you a dollar - but they might know someone or work for someone who will give you millions. Software engineers love things that they can use for free and that has often paid dividends for companies behind those free things.

nindalf 3 days ago

I built my website on Cloudflare Pages and ended up using basically their entire suite of tools - Pages, D1, Analytics, Rules, Functions. The DX was pretty good because all of these features worked well together.

Cloudflare offered all of this for free because it gets them positive mentions (like the one you’re reading right now) and they’re educating a bunch of developers on their entire product portfolio. And what does it cost to host my blog that 1000-2000 views a month? Literally nothing.

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  • mentalgear 2 days ago

    This approach is good as long as the tech stack is open source and portable to other platforms. Otherwise, no matter how good a company/CEO seems ATM, you are ultimately at their mercy if they decide to raise prices significantly.

    By using an open, interoperable tech stack, you maintain the freedom to switch to another cloud provider at will.

    This shared fluid power also creates a compelling reason for cloud providers to remain honest and competitive in their dealings with customers.

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    • nindalf 2 days ago

      You don't get it.

      For most companies free users are just a source of potential paid customers. Such companies squeeze the free users to force them to upgrade. For Cloudflare the millions of free users strengthen their negotiating power with ISPs around the world. We provide value to Cloudflare just by being Cloudflare customers. It is possible that Cloudflare might get a CEO who doesn't understand this, but possible doesn't mean likely.

      In any case, I've built my website with Astro, pulling in the Cloudflare integration as a dependency. If I wanted to switch to Vercel or Netlify or whatever else, Astro makes it easy. As for database, others offer managed Sqlite.

      If all else fails, I'll ditch the few dynamic parts of the website and deploy the bulk of the site as static html to Github Pages or something.

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  • Moru 2 days ago

    I have been bitten many times by this usage of free stuff that suddenly starts to cost money so it took a while before I dared to use cloudflare. Have been using it for a few years now without any surprise bills so still happy. Hope I didn't jinx it now. :-)

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    • nindalf 2 days ago

      Think it'll stay the same as long as the CEO (Prince) and CTO (Graham-Cumming) stay in place. Policies might change with a change of leadership, but even then I don't consider it likely.

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ljm 3 days ago

I feel like there might be an additional motivation too, which is that this investment in a better internet (free SSL for everyone before LetsEncrypt came around, generous free tiers for users, etc. etc.) means that Cloudflare builds a reputation of being a steward of the ecosystem while also benefitting indirectly from wider adoption of good, secure practices.

In some ways it's analogous to investing in your local community and arguably paying tax: it's rare that you would directly and personally benefit from this, but if the environment you live in improves from it, crime is reduced, more to do, etc. then you can enjoy a better quality of life.

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  • ipaddr 3 days ago

    Have they made a better internet? Many would say that made it worse.

    Reply View 27 replies
    • Ayesh 3 days ago

      > made it worse.

      I'd say this too. I'm giving LetsEncrypt 100% credit for making HTTPS so ubiquitous and free.

      But CloudFlare certainly made things worse for "webmaster" era of the Internet, with everything centralized to CloudFlare. I live in Vietnam, and CloudFlare has made things super annoying with their captcha challenges everywhere.

      Credit where it's due, CloudFlare pushed HTTP/2 and 3 adoption. More websites are available over IPv6, and their 1.1.1.1 DNS is actually quite nice.

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      • twothamendment 2 days ago

        I'm in the USA, but run Linux. I am getting tired of proving I'm not a bot. I'm on a static IP and they still can't figure out that I'm not a bot.

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      • usr1106 2 days ago

        I don't think they have a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs make the users work, Google does this with their reCAPTCHA. The user has to to free work to help Google with their training of machine learning models. I absolutely hate to do work to increase Google's already outrageous profits and leave the page immediately unless it is very important for me to visit it.

        Cloudflare has something called Turnstyle where the browser needs to do work. It's a bit of energy waste, but smooth for the user. Unless their algorithm comes to an incorrect decision and doesn't let you in. Then it's infuriating. For me in Europe that seems to be rare, but I have no idea how well it works in Vietnam.

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    • stubish 3 days ago

      Overall, certainly. There are some negative things people talk about that you might agree with, but look back at what the market was that they disrupted and continue to disrupt. I think that without Cloudflare your registrar would be GoDaddy and your SSL certificates would be from Verisign and your rents would be huge. Backbone wise, that would depend on your region.

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      • ipaddr 3 days ago

        My registrar were different before and after godaddy existed and plenty of varieties existed. I find less exist now than during GoDaddy's heyday. But less people care about domain names as they stopped becoming a lottery ticket.

        My worries were paypal would take over but then came stripe.

        SSL certificates were from Verisign until letsencrypt offered thek free. I didn't see Cloudflare changing that market.

        Before them we had uunet and other backbone providers.

        Cloudflare made their name from ddos protection attacks. They made that market.

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        • zuppy a day ago

          For DDOS there was and still is Prolexic/Akamai. Cloudflare did not made that market, they just took a big chunk of it. There are other big players too, like Google.

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    • danielheath 3 days ago

      I mean, maybe we would have found another solution to DDOS, but as someone who has had a pretty significant attack (on a service which is a clear public good) mitigated for free… it’s pretty nice being able to keep your services online in a hostile environment.

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    • lostlogin 3 days ago

      I don’t know the history here, do you have some examples?

      My usage is pretty much limited to their DNS.

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      • jsheard 3 days ago

        They're pretty reviled by people who go out of their way to be private via things like VPNs and locked down browsers, because that constantly trips their bot detection and makes using the web miserable.

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        • chrismorgan 3 days ago

          And in places where CGNAT is in use, so that many people are on the same IP address, and botnets are active on that address.

          I live in India in such a situation, and most of the time it’s not too bad, but I still encounter Cloudflare CAPTCHAs pretty frequently. At times, it’s been almost half the web is blocking you. And occasionally, it actually is blocking you, not just a CAPTCHA. It’s also not rare, when being more aggressively blocked, for a site to break because it tries loading scripts from another domain, which is then CAPTCHAing so that scripts just won’t load.

          Back when I lived in Australia, I practically never got Cloudflare blocks.

          The mechanism may be understandable and even justifiable to a considerable extent, but the poor definitely end up suffering more from Cloudflare than the rich.

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      • wbl 3 days ago

        There's a ton of sites that ISPs wouldn't sell service to if it wasn't for Cloudflare making it difficult to determine where those sites were. It's basically /dev/null for abuse reports.

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bentcorner 3 days ago

Reminds me of the School -> Pro pipeline where companies sell cheaply or even give away their software to learning institutions so that students who go pro are familiar with their tools and then later recommend it for their work.

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  • DaiPlusPlus 3 days ago

    That’s absolutely true for things like MS Office and Adobe - but it also works in the other direction: I’m sure making kids use Java for AP computer-science or for undergrad contributed to its uncool status today.

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    • ninjha 3 days ago

      The two almost-contradictory takes I hold about this are…

      - Java is cool, actually

      - Java would be just as uncool even if people weren’t required to use it in school

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    • mschuster91 3 days ago

      The problem for Java's "uncool status" isn't Java as a programming language, the JVM or its academic use IMHO, it rather is a consequence of large-enterprise culture.

      Large enterprise doesn't value "creativity" or any deviation from standards, but it does value plans and estimates - hence clueless, brainless "managers" and "architects" forced programmers to do absolutely insane bullshit busywork that a gang of monkeys on LSD could do, and that culture spread throughout the large-enterprise world.

      On top of that come "design by committee" stuff like CORBA, XML, SOAP, Java EE, Enterprise Beans and everything associated with this particular horror show, JDBC...

      You can do absolutely mind blowing stuff with Java and the JVM. But fuck corporate for torturing Java and the poor sods tasked with the busywork. Java got the image it has because programmers want to be creative but could not be so because their bosses were braindead.

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      • nasduia 3 days ago

        The historical Java patterns of factories of gizmos modified by adapters on adapters etc. really makes the large codebases miserable to work on. Along its enterprise lifespan it picked up all the fad modelling/project jargon/pattern nonsense (which as you rightly say were there to limit creativity) and that is now embedded in codebases. It might be that a new Java enterprise application started from scratch would be lovely, but those are rarely seen in the actual enterprise world.

        I don't think it was ever uncool because of the core language, it was always uncool because of the standard libraries, UIs and culture.

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        • DaiPlusPlus 3 days ago

          > I don't think it was ever uncool because of the core language

          Putting type-erasure vs. reification to side, I'm going to disagree here: for reasons unknown, Java's language designers have adopted a dogmatic opposition to class-properties (i.e. field-like syntax for invoking getters and setters), operator-overloading, or any kind of innovation of syntax.

          I appreciate the problem of backwards-compatibility (and forwards-compat too), but the past 30 years of software and programming-language usage and design shows that field-like getters/setters (i.e. "properties") are a good and useful feature to have; so if Java is going to overlook something as basic as properties (pun intended), then it follows that Java's designers will similarly disregard other language design innovations (case-in-point: if "value types" are even an innovation).

          I can say there is one thing that Java has done well, and that's make a good music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JZnj4eNHXE

          -----

          Yes, Project Loom's reinvention of Green Threads is cool, but that's not anywhere near enough to address Java's declining relevance and credibility as an application-programming language in the era of C# 13, Rust and TypeScript (and yes, I know Rust doesn't have properties - but the rest-of-Rust more than makes up for it). My main take-away from the past 15+ years is that Java fell-behind everyone else; it's not that C# is Microsoft's take on Java, but that Java is now a third-rate C#.

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  • Brian_K_White 3 days ago

    Autocad 10-12 back in college. Cost thousands of dollars in 80s/90s dollars, Not officially allowed to copy, but in reality effortless to copy and run at home for free.

    There were other products aiming to be just as good at the same time that were actually protected with dongles and such.

    The one that everyone could run at home is the one that took over the world.

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    • taneq 3 days ago

      Same with Photoshop, and Windows, and plenty of others. Intentional or not, the ease of copying these products is what made them ubiquitous.

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      • akoboldfrying 2 days ago

        I think Windows was ubiquitous because for a long time there was nothing else usable for Joe Average on PCs, and PCs were essentially the only game in town until Apple got its act together.

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fheisler 3 days ago

This is exactly our thinking with authentik (open source IdP), and it's played out in practice so far. Enterprise sales conversations are so much easier when they start with "we all use you in our homelabs already." We're much more focused on giving those individual users a positive early experience (in hopes that some small percentage will really pay off down the road) than in extracting a few dollars from each of them.

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  • CWuestefeld 2 days ago

    I had this exact conversation with a Cloudflare rep a year or two ago, after I told her how I user their free DNS service. She said, "that free service was the best thing we ever did". And we wound up buying their bot management and DDOS services.

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