Comment by nindalf

Comment by nindalf 3 days ago

4 replies

View on Hacker News

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.

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.

Reply View 1 reply
  • 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.

    Reply View 0 replies
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. :-)

Reply View 1 reply
  • 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.

    Reply View 0 replies