Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

jpetazzo.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 136 posts

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#61

Post by csande17 »

fragmede wrote: post #29
reaperman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I've not tried Amazon walkout technology but it sounds like a good application of technology. if the system knows you took something, just charge the user for it rather than making a fuss about it. (in b4 it's Actually Indians.)

> (in b4 it's Actually Indians.)

Bad news:

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-reportedly-ditches-just-walk-out-...

> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#62

Post by Beijinger »

zaidf wrote: post #35

(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 th…

[flagged]

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#63

Post by ffsm8 »

xmorse wrote: post #53
jgrahamc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Egress was pretty much always unmetered until AWS came along. And it still is with most providers other then the usual suspects (AWS,azure, Google cloud)

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#64

Post by milankragujevic »

jgrahamc wrote: post #49
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…

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/…

While I honestly and wholeheartedly respect what you are doing with Cloudflare, and also yourself as a person and an engineer, and having been using Cloudflare and advocating for Cloudflare myself since 2011., I must correct you that given the recent scandals with "mandatory optional upgrades" and "waiving the abuse away - if you pay" (see the relatively recent post on robindev substack), nothing Cloudflare promises can be considered free and without shakedown. The reputation of the company has finally been tarnished. I'm truly sorry to have seen it happen.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#65

Post by adityapatadia »

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…

S3 costs seem low at start but their data transfer is very expensive at volume (~10 cent per GB)

It's almost always best to use some sort of image processing service (like Gumlet.com) to optimise images and then pay lower per GB bandwidth costs.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#66

Post by adityapatadia »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #44
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…

I'd recommend just going on-premise for storage. You can build a full system with more than enough RAID-1 storage which will have 100% ROI in a few months compared to what they're supposed to pay for Cloudflare Images. Just use that as a storage backend for your webservers in the cloud.

I would propose another solution. Use min.io to create object storage. It has all the advantages of RAID-1 and also gives S3-compatible API.

This is only profitable if the data volume is huge though. For 5-10 TB, one is always best served by cloud storage providers like S3, R2 or Wasabi.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#67

Post by adityapatadia »

JimDabell wrote: post #45

Cloudflare billing is pretty crazy. We had an annual contract with them for Cloudflare Stream, their video transcoding / streaming / hosting service. We had negotiated a contract with a fixed capacity and overage charges for when we went over them. They estimated our usage for six months out and twelve months out, then spread the fixed cost out across two six month periods, billing monthly. So in effect, we would be…

This seems like a really painful incident. Do give a try to Gumlet.com (I am the founder) and you will get a way easier and better stream experience.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#68

Post by ikiris »

milankragujevic wrote: post #64
jgrahamc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

While I honestly and wholeheartedly respect what you are doing with Cloudflare, and also yourself as a person and an engineer, and having been using Cloudflare and advocating for Cloudflare myself since 2011., I must correct you that given the recent scandals with "mandatory optional upgrades" and "waiving the abuse away - if you pay" (see the relatively recent post on robindev substack), nothing Cloudflare promises…

Almost all of those "scandals" have been a scummy site in some way that was unsurprising to people who have worked abuse in the space.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#69

Post by toomuchtodo »

ffsm8 wrote: post #63
xmorse wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's free until it isn't anymore

Egress was pretty much always unmetered until AWS came along. And it still is with most providers other then the usual suspects (AWS,azure, Google cloud)

Right, Cloudflare is operating in good faith, and while the deal could change (because business is business and sometimes the offering has to change), one should ensure they have other options available for egress from origin. That's not a Cloudflare issue, that's a vendor risk management issue. You should always have alternatives planned if a vendor's specific offering at a price point is a material component of your business costs.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#70

Post by Heff »

_adamb wrote: 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.…

Which stream/encoding service did you switch to?
Post reply on HN