Comment by gruez 3 days ago
See my other comment[1]. I'm not sure why you're straining so hard and spending so many words to defend "general scumminess", like the the right of a gambling site hosting dozens of domains (to evade government bans) on shared cloudflare IPs, or people expecting to get 1.2PB of bandwidth served out of a $200 CDN plan.
>You want this to be complicated so badly, but it's not.
>Hidden limits are an anti-pattern.
>There is no counter-argument.
Here's a counterargument: do you get similarly upset that restaurants advertising "free refills" cut you off after you've been at the place for 12 hours and you dispensed 8L of coke? Explicit limits is how you get "limit one refill per customer", leaving most customers worse off.
Do I think hidden limits are always better? No. It operates on a spectrum, and depends on how many "legitimate" customers are affected by the limit.
It doesn't sound like the number of refills is the real problem if you're worried about someone staying for 12 hours.
If the rule was "you have to leave after 2 hours" or "after an hour, you get one last refill", that would solve the problem and affect almost nobody else, while being nice and explicit about expectations. (Or cut those numbers in half if you want, it's just an example.)
>It doesn't sound like the number of refills is the real problem if you're worried about someone staying for 12 hours.
A butt in seat doesn't cost the business any money as long as it's not displacing any paying customers (ie. the place isn't packed). Soda might be cheap but it's not free, so dispensing 8L of product does cost the business money.
>If the rule was "you have to leave after 2 hours" or "after an hour, you get one last refill", that would solve the problem and affect almost nobody else, while being nice and explicit about expectations. (Or cut those numbers in half if you want, it's just an example.)
See my other point about people riding up the limit. When you institute an explicit limit, you end up having to be more conservative because an explicit limit emboldens people to ride up right against the limit, rather than a fuzzy limit with the expectation that people act "reasonably". Instituting the limits you proposed would cause the problematic customers to chug soda within the allotted time, for instance. It also becomes a hassle for everyone else who's being reasonable. If I'm meeting with some friends after and need to kill an hour or two, I suddenly have to worry about whether I can stay without getting kicked out, etc. Most people, even above-average utilization customers lose out from this, and the only people who benefit are the ones taking advantage to an absurd degree.
> Instituting the limits you proposed would cause the problematic customers to chug soda within the allotted time, for instance.
How much soda do you think they're going to chug? That sounds weird and rare. I don't think it's a limit where you're going to have a problematic amount of riding.
> If I'm meeting with some friends after and need to kill an hour or two, I suddenly have to worry about whether I can stay without getting kicked out, etc.
That's not consistent with the idea that the business is fine with you sitting around for a while. If they're fine with that, they would only limit your refills after a point. That rule should give you no reason to worry about being forced to leave.
Though is buying a new drink after two hours a big deal in the first place...?
Ok, so when open a restaurant offering refills of soda for tonight's dinner you can have hidden limits...
And when you build a SaaS that people build entire businesses on, you can state your limits transparently and openly.
Not sure this is the gotcha that you think it is.
Yes.
I won't hold them to the same standards, they're not the same thing.
If you want to wax poetic about drink policies go right on ahead, no push back from me.
Cloudflare doesn't have hidden limits. Their limits are not written down, and they're somewhat moving targets (which is probably why they're not written down); but they're very obvious (in an economic sense), and their value (at any given point in time) is very easily measured.
Cloudflare's limits can be formalized by imagining one of their PMs saying the following: "You can do things on our general infrastructure for free, as long as we don't offer more-specific infrastructure that's intended specifically for the thing you're doing. And even then, we will let you use the general infrastructure as a "workaround" to needing to engage with the domain-specific infrastructure... up until the point where — if you had been using the purpose-built domain-specific infrastructure from the beginning — the cost model for that specific infrastructure would have had you spending enough money, that the 'uncaptured revenue' you would represent, would begin to affect one of our salespeople's KPIs. Once you hit that point, our salespeople will come to 'convert' you."
For examples:
• You can force regular old Cloudflare to cache large image assets through Page Rules, with long TTLs, for free. Or you can stuff your large image assets into Cloudflare R2, lose the ability to set long TTLs, and pay per (origin-pull) GET request above a certain daily free-tier limit. If you serve enough image assets through Page Rules that you represent non-trivial uncaptured R2 revenue, then Cloudflare will contact you.
• You can force a Cloudflare Pages site to do small amounts of CF Workers logic in the routing phase of serving the page, for free. Or you can put an actual Worker in front of a regular static site, and pay per GET request + per CPU-second after some free-tier thresholds. If you use enough CPU-seconds inside the "unbilled" stage of your Cloudflare Pages site, Cloudflare will contact you. (Note that they're very unlikely to come after you for this, since the limit on the amount of work you can do here is pretty trivial, so you'd have to be getting a ridiculous amount of requests for this overhead to add up to anything meaningful.)
• Previously, you could force Cloudflare to resize images "on the way through" for free, using a /cdn-cgi/ path. These days, you're forced to go through Cloudflare Images, which charges per request and (IIRC) per processed byte. This is because everyone was using the free approach and ignoring the Cloudflare Images infra, and Cloudflare saw hundreds to thousands of accounts with potential non-trivial un-captured revenue here. Rather than address them all individually, they "sunsetted" the support for free image resizing, to force these accounts to either start paying or get out.
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Note how this is exactly the same as a restaurant saying: "you can have water for free, and we'll put a lemon slice in your water, but we're not going to give you enough lemon slices and table sugar packets to make lemonade with — because we charge for lemonade. Just buy the gosh-darn lemonade; stop exploiting our kindness to make it yourself; by doing so, you're using way more of our resources than if you'd just let us make it."
There's nothing hidden about the cost of lemons or sugar packets. The restaurant is going to give you lemons and sugar packets for free right up until your consumption could have paid for a lemonade. Then they're gonna force you to buy the lemonade.
i agree with all your points - but i wish the lemonade didn't have arbitrary pricing up to $5k a month
If 1.2 PB is a problem, then why don't they just specify a bandwidth limit of say 1 PB? They specifically say "unlimited bandwidth", so yes, what they are doing _is_ scummy because there is a very obvious incongruity between what they claim and what they actually offer.
This is just stratified pricing. If you're egressing 1.2PB ($50k+ worth of bw on AWS) there's a likelihood that you're earning a fair bit and an enterprise contract will be worth it to you when it comes to support. On the other hand if you're egressing 1.2PB to serve some open model weights that you don't charge for, CF would prefer to leave you to it and enable you to serve.
You want this to be complicated so badly, but it's not.
Hidden limits are an anti-pattern.
There is no counter-argument.
If they have a hard limit they can cut people off well ahead of 1.2PB of bandwidth with less ambiguity: it's a strictly better situation.