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Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

jpetazzo.github.io

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Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#31

Post by BiteCode_dev »

reaperman wrote: post #26
bobbob1921 wrote: post #22

I feel many cloud billing models are set up to initially account for the abusers of the service, and then account for the legitimate users. (in other words everyone’s assume to be a scammer or abuser, until you prove otherwise). It’s an interesting concept, a corollary would be walking into a physical store and being treated as a thief, until you check out and make payment. (in fact the opposite is true generally as…

These days I get the feeling of being treated as a thief whenever I walk into a Walmart or some Home Depots. Gotta go through a pedestrian gate set up well inside the store (turnstile basically) and lots of cameras in your face specifically to say “Hey you thief, we’re watching you with our AI”.

Same feeling.

Between the cameras, the guards everywhere, the anti-thief systems on products, the alarm portals and the ticket check, the whole experience is super aggressive.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#32

Post by thrdbndndn »

Great read.

To summarize, I think this issue comes down to the fact CF didn't design well around the scenario that someone may upgrade their image storage capacity multiple times in a billing cycle, which seems to be the case for the author. If you only upgrade zero or once each cycle, it's not too bad.

I understand they want it to be prepaid. But I wonder why they don't just do the calculation upfront and charge you the difference (times the remaining days in the billing cycle) every time you upgrade.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#33

Post by bonestamp2 »

antisthenes wrote: post #18

Every SAAS company is overcharging you for their service, because hardware these days are dirt cheap. That's literally their business model.

I was thinking the same thing when I saw the title. But, my next thought was: what a reasonable profit margin before it's considered "over charging"... 20%? 50%? 100%? 200%?

Is that even the right way to look at it? I mean, perhaps some company is providing enough value and enjoyment of their product that a 500% profit margin is gleefully paid by their customers.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#34

Post by tootie »

Scaevolus wrote: post #6

I clicked assuming this was analyzing how hilariously expensive Images is compared to most of their offerings, but it's about how hilariously bad Images' payment structure is. Nice! > It’s likely that we will replace Cloudflare Images in the long run. Looking at storage costs alone, S3 would be 4 times less expensive for our use-case. Cloudflare R2 would likely be a good choice too, if you're willing to bet that the…

The docs say it's possible to resize images from an external source like S3 using Cloudflare Images. It seems like it's not straightforward, but would be possible with some configuration.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#35

Post by zaidf »

(I work on the Images product at Cloudflare)

While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post:

if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+

I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate this further. Also happy to chat with anyone else with questions or issues (zaid at cloudflare)

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#37

Post by horsawlarway »

Dachande663 wrote: post #15

I would be interested to know pageviews/bandwidth because this feels like it's still at the scale of it could run on a single box (rather than Heroku or a whole kubernetes cluster as seems to be the current case). For reference, we served a genealogy image/audio/video site from two servers behind an LB for ~$60/mo and handled 100K pageviews a day with nary a bother.

I would second this. Based on the initial numbers he provided (1 million images served a month, image size between 10kb and 1mb) I would expect to be able to trivially host this on pretty much anything in any major metro.

Even at his worst case (all images are 1mb) - they're only serving ~1tb per month in image data (admittedly, he mentioned these were stale numbers, so it'll have increased since then).

But I serve 1tb/month (actually much more than this) on old gaming machines sitting in my basement with just a standard comcast business line, just hosting media for my extended family.

I pay 200/m for the business line, and then another 15 in electric costs. And I need the internet either way.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#38

Post by BiteCode_dev »

antisthenes wrote: post #18

Every SAAS company is overcharging you for their service, because hardware these days are dirt cheap. That's literally their business model.

The hard part is the replication and up time, because you can serve a ton of images from a VPS for pennies on the dollar.

But even then, images are quite simple to deal with compared to big files like videos because you don't have to chunk them. So just copying them several time and putting a load balancing in front of it will get you 99% there for half of the price, dev time included.

For most companies, you don't need more.

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