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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?

#71

Post by adityapatadia »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #38
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 n…

Founder of Gumlet.com here (we serve more than 2 billion images per day).

Here are the reasons image processing on VPS is hard.

- Reliability and uptime is a huge concern. If service goes down, images can show broken - When you build it yourself, you pay for image processing, bandwidth AND developer time. image processing at multiple terabytes and half a million image processed is not trivial ( inputs can be crazy and output needs to be modified as per the requesting platform) - Images form a big part of Google web vitals so slow image processing can hurt LCP score. - Newer formats like AVIF and JXL are increasingly complex. They need way more processing power than plain old JPEG.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#72

Post by _adamb »

solardev wrote: post #59
_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.…

How do you like Cloudinary compared to Imgix?

I've never used imgix but I find Cloudinary (and specifically the Media Optimizer product) to be extremely reliable, reasonably priced, and as close to zero-maintenance as a thing can be.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#73

Post by _adamb »

Heff wrote: post #70
_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?

We use MUX now. They have excellent support (They've helped us fix a number of things that we screwed up ourselves) & a very reliable service.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#75

Post by normie3000 »

csande17 wrote: post #56
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/…

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"…

> don't overburden our servers

Does this effectively mean DDoS protection that's free until you actually use it?

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#76

Post by Heff »

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…

Founder of Mux here. Not to pile on, but happy to chat (steve at mux). We've had detailed usage-based billing from day one, and even have APIs for reporting on your usage.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#78

Post by miyuru »

Cloudflare billing seems to a mess.

I received an invoice for cloudflare domains with incorrect billing period when I renewed it early. It calculated the billing period from the date invoice was created, instead of the the actual year in the future I was renewing it for.

It was not a huge issue, but I reported it via support and they acknowledge the issue. This was in 2023.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#79

Post by Terr_ »

normie3000 wrote: post #75
csande17 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

> don't overburden our servers Does this effectively mean DDoS protection that's free until you actually use it?

Speaking as a bystander, a more-charitable option might be: "DDoS protection is free for targets which fit a generic risk-profile and are targeted randomly or only for small-scale spite."

P.S.: In contrast, imagine a website dedicated to journalistic content about how {dictator} is a crook and a parasite that has made {country} weak and a joke to the rest of the world. If there's a regular nation-state level DDoS from nodes in {country}, Cloudflare might say: "Hey, uh, your situation is not normal anymore, and it's not exactly your fault be we are a business that needs to recoup costs..."

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#80

Post by jallmann »

I actually have a similar story about Cloudflare, image hosting, billing and support, but the amounts involved were nowhere near as high.

I was evaluating image hosts a while ago. CF Images seemed promising but I was afraid that my use-case would grow to become cost-prohibitive, and I really didn't want to deal with a migration off it later. So I settled on rolling-my-own with R2 and ffmpeg to pre-generate a few renditions [1].

In short, R2 billing is weird. I actually haven't updated my bucket in months and yet the storage amount fluctuates a bit month-to-month. (Is R2 storage accounting probabilistic?!?) I also got hit by a billing line item in May for "R2 late usage" from Feb to March which I could not find any information about.

Their support only recently got back to me, with a very unhelpful / irrelevant answer of course.

The amounts involved are only ~$1 so I don't care too much - I was mostly curious - and I don't blame them for maybe not wanting to expend too much effort looking into irregularities on such a tiny account.

No regrets though. Using CF Images would still be 5x more expensive month-to-month even at my (tiny) scale. The $5-per-100k flat-rate is probably the thing that allows them to make any money on image hosting.

[1] Word to the wise - there are a lot of subtleties around building production-scale image hosting that often times it may be much easier to simply pay the premium for a managed service. For example, what if you want to only generate renditions just-in-time to save on storage? What about updating your rendition list on the fly, eg adding a new one, or even removing older ones from storage? When / how often should you sweep storage of unused renditions?

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