Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project

I'd expect it to be based on the Accept request header (and possibly the Content-Type response header to prevent bypassing it). Or perhaps even the Content-Type of past requests to that url.

But I don't really understand what the purpose of these captcha checks is in the first place. Handling a captcha challenge is more expensive for the server than most GET requests. Perhaps it's done in anticipation of later POST requests (which can't be blocked transparently without breaking the functionality of the website).

the advanced cache statistics (will help us reduce traffic sent to the S3 origin, in one case, and reduce bandwidth cost)

Traffic is served from the closest location to the user (instead of the bigger central locations, where they can serve traffic cheaper)

Plus paid suppport, for sure

1. Cloudflare doesn’t send 503 when they’re deliberately rate limiting; they send it when there’s an unexpected problem. It’s fairly rare, and it usually results in something being posted on cloudflarestatus.com if it persists.

2. Sometimes error rates are low enough or the conditions are obscure enough that you may have to contact support to point out that it’s happening. This is even rarer.

3. When you switch between plans, the IP addresses assigned to you may change, and users may hit different edges. If the issue is regional (as is usually the case), this may resolve it.

4. I have been sending tens of requests per second to a free plan over the course of several years and have never measured an increase in 503 responses on Cloudflare’s end compared to a paid plan.

5. Cloudflare’s response mentions specific 503 errors that are fairly rare; they’re notable because they look like a standard Nginx 503 page, rather than a nice Cloudflare error page. The only difference is that they will say “cloudflare” at the bottom where the Nginx version would normally be. You probably frequent sites that use Cloudflare free plans; how often do you see this error message?

6. What the hell is this n=1 correlation? It reads like a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy theory.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Cloudflare, but this isn’t one of them.

There is no such thing as a free lunch [0] for people to depend a commercial service on. If your business model depends on another company providing you a free service perhaps you should reconsider.

This seems to be a person being cheap and jumping to conclusions, claiming broad assumptions and conjecture as fact.

Yes, cloudflare's free tier is deliberately dropping your requests to foil your freeloading commercial company - raise pitchforks!

Assuming this is all true (which I don't), I don't feel sympathy for the author for not purchasing a paid plan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as...