You had some - millions (?) of - DNS queries free in the past.

I'm glad to hear the queries are free now! I somehow managed to blow through the free quota, not by like a crazy amount but enough that I started thinking in most circumstances why pay extra for basic dns when registrar's is free? Even barely used domains were getting tons of queries. And I only need the fancy failover feature on a couple domains, though it is nice for those for sure. Anyway with this I don't have to worry about it anymore, so thanks Bunny!

First time I am hearing of paying for DNS resolution but I am just a civilian.

Aws charges for everything including that.

route53 charge somewhere in the region of $0.40 per million queries

Yes. Many others are free with no $1 minimum (e.g. Cloudflare)

I wanted to give Cloudflare a go, but I did not want to move my whole domain. Unfortunately you can only host a subdomain with a paid account.

You only have to have them be your domain's name servers. Domains can stay at another registrar. This is pretty risk-free. They didn't even used to be a registrar until recently and they don't support registering all tlds so this always worked.

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something something are the product

Cloudflare's business model appears to be wait till someone is generating lots of bandwidth and then give them 30 days to move up a tier or be closed down.

I've read reports of companies on the business plan being strong armed into signing Enterprise plans with 1 year upfront.

It's a listed company with revenue expectations, and VERY good at marketing itself, but it's free tier of CDN/DDOS to start off with is a good deal.

Cloudflare's business model was to protect DDoS "providers"/booters for free, so DDoS became something everyone had to worry about (before cloudflare they tended to DDoS eachother), and then sell the cure.

Krebs wrote some rather scathing posts about them when they were starting up.

Move up a tier or move somewhere where it costs even more. That seems kinda reasonable, really.

CloudFlare uses that Slack Hack Club model?

Not _quite_ in this case, since the free plan improves everyone's experience: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

Well except of the people that may solve the damn captchas (: