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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?

#51

[flagged]

It's a little worse than that. If you need to upgrade at least once per billing cycle, the system keeps charging you more and more (since an upgrade will always have a higher total cost than the previous upgrade) each cycle while accruing credits that will never start paying down unless/until you have a billing cycle without an upgrade. That's not a great design for most systems, but especially bad for a scalable image service intended to facilitate the flexibility of growth.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#52
tl;dr

The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float".

Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle.

This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#53

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…

if you're willing to bet that the (inevitable?) shakedown for money once you find the limits of "unlimited egress with no fees" won't be too bad. R2 egress is free. There's no shakedown. If you look at https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage (the original announcement) we said many times that egress is free. That's sort of R2's whole thing! See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/…

It's free until it isn't anymore

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#54

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…

Backblaze is interesting too for this kind of storage.

Cloudflare is free but concerned it won’t be regularly. Someone’s paying for it sooner or layer

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#56

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…

if you're willing to bet that the (inevitable?) shakedown for money once you find the limits of "unlimited egress with no fees" won't be too bad. R2 egress is free. There's no shakedown. If you look at https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage (the original announcement) we said many times that egress is free. That's sort of R2's whole thing! See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/…

If Cloudflare really is serious about this for R2, that's going to be difficult for them to communicate in a trustworthy way. Their other products (in particular their flagship DDOS mitigation service) definitely seem to operate on a "free, but if your site is large enough you'll get an email from salespeople threatening to disconnect you unless you pay $$$" basis, using the boilerplate "don't overburden our servers" clause in their ToS.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#57

tl;dr The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float". Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle. This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.

[deleted]

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#59
post #48

We actually switched FROM cloudflare TO cloudinary. CF seemed cheaper, but we found the service, the dashboard, and the service to be wildly erratic. Price went all over the place, we'd get double billed, the dashboard would stop working for a week. Maybe Cloudinary is more expensive (though not by a lot for our use case) but I can say that nobody has had to log in or think about it for months. The thing just works.…

How do you like Cloudinary compared to Imgix?

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#60

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…

if you're willing to bet that the (inevitable?) shakedown for money once you find the limits of "unlimited egress with no fees" won't be too bad. R2 egress is free. There's no shakedown. If you look at https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage (the original announcement) we said many times that egress is free. That's sort of R2's whole thing! See also: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/…

I know, but I suspect that would be strongly tested somewhere between PB/mo and EB/mo when building a large streaming platform.
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