It's seriously good value for small websites. Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well. And they have a few other things that aren't half bad to use with pretty generous freemium layers.
We used Google's CDN for the last six years or so but it's pretty annoying to deal with and you have to pay for a load balancer every month in order to properly use it. That adds up to quite a bit per year. Even if all you are doing is routing domains to some bucket with a website.
We migrated most of our gcloud stuff to Hetzner beginning of the year. That left a load balancer and a few static websites hosted in Google buckets. I migrated all of that to Cloudflare just a few months ago.
I still have a few buckets in gcloud proxied via a vm in hetzner with a proxied domain in Cloudflare. Not the most elegant route but it works. I might optimize some of that later. At this point, we pay for some Google buckets and not much else in gcloud.
Honestly, Google and AWS need to start paying attention to Cloudflare more. Their complexity is chasing people towards Cloudflare. The hoops you have to jump through with both of them to host a simple website with their CDNs is embarrassing. I've gone through the process with both of them. Although my experience with Route53 is a bit stale at this point. On Cloudflare, getting an new website up and running with a freshly registered domain takes only a few minutes.
I used to find AWS unusable, then I realized I can just tell Claude Code or Codex to manage it. This makes it into an entirely different product, where price is the only barrier.
The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers. Cloudflare is the LG TV of websites, but it's worse because we've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade and we still keep using it for some reason.
> The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers
You're replying to a comment talking about migrating from Google, so I assume you're claiming this is more of a risk with Cloudflare than Google (or other American providers like AWS)?
If so, what's your source for that claim?
> The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.
I doubt the NSA is gobbling up all the CF traffic because maybe, maybe they will find something of interest.
Can the NSA make CF "mirror" your website traffic to them if you are of interest to them, most likely yes.
I am not that paranoid to think that my website of a few corporate pages is of interest to the NSA.
The NSA collects and archives all internet traffic it can access for future analysis. It's the purpose of the Utah Data center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
That doesn't seem unique to Cloudflare though
No, but nothing comes close to their breadth and scale.
> The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.
I think it’s fair to assume that for most companies, cost is essentially zero on the company’s side.
I have a small site on Cloudflare that lists a brief introduction of a sawmill, its operating hours and contacts, and a map that advises which roads to take to reach it. Everything's public already. There's some modest value in tracking who visits the site, but with popular operating systems leaking like a sieve on the client side, that fight was lost a long time ago.
"We've known it has an always-on microphone and speech-to-text for over a decade"
Literally? What is the reference here?
https://allaboutcookies.org/lg-smart-tvs-snooping
Yeah, about those I know, but what about cloudflare?
They hold your tls keys and can decrypt all your traffic. They're MITM as a service, by definition. They have to be able to in order to cache and forward appropriately.
If you care about security and specifically NSA, don't use US clouds (owned or hosted), period. There is not a single one they don't have full access to, why should there be one.
Or clouds in general, its all wishful thinking and pinky promises.
Is there any evidence of this
Well it is known SSL termination servers are a popular target: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...
The reputational damage for CF would be intense.
Businesses won't tolerate something like this so I find it hard to believe there is any cooperation between the two entities.
They already terminate TLS at their edge. It takes one secret court order for them to start sending data to the NSA.
I also believed that, but at least for India, this doesn't work in practice. Unless you atleast do the 25$ pro plan, cloudflare routes even india-to-india, hell, even mumbai-to-mumbai and aws_mumbai-to-cloudflare_mumbai traffic via Marsaille!! Not even Singapore. The unstated reason is that indian transit is expensive, though I fail to believe its cheaper to go from mumbai to marsaille and back to mumbai.
I am guessing the real reason (and at this point I am discounting incompetence - this has been true for years, so they are aware). You switch to the pro plan for the zone and everything now routes within india, 100s of milliseconds of latency saved.
Its even worse for workers and workers AI and embedding search. I found multiple seconds of latency, all vanishing the moment the zone is on pro plan (It seems R2, workers, workers AI - none of them are deployed in an India POP - unconfirmed, of course, cause there is no way to actually communicate with cloudflare).
Now 25$/month isn't much - though it does change calculations compared to "FREE!!" - but I would have liked to know this going in, instead of discovering this after having made the commitment. Seems like a deliberate dark pattern, to force people into the pro plan.
Shame, really - I love the CF stack(workers and DO are just so fantastic to build on), but these shenanigans, plus the utter refusal to provide ANY level of support, keep souring me on them.
> Basically, there is no cost aside from the domain. And for registering and managing domains, they are pretty much the most affordable option as well.
You don't need to register your domain with them. Only make their DNS servers your domain name servers.