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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?

#101

Post by gjs4786 »

geodel wrote: post #83
normie3000 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thats basically for everything. Do you think home insurance will pay if you burn down house every year. Or car insurance if you trash it few times a year. I see DDOS protection as kind of insurance for event happening once in a while, if it happens all the time one definitely needs something more than a free service.

Yeah, but they aren't the ones, presumably, who are DDOSing their own site.

Warning: Insurance is not going to pay if YOU burn down your home /// even a little bit ///!!!

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#102

Post by theamk »

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…

Many stores have visible anti-theft defenses which inconvenience honest people, such as placing items in locked cabinets where you have to call a seller if you want to look at them.

This is more common in the higher-crime areas, but even in the low-crime places, this seems to be very common a lot with small and expensive things (jewelry, high-end electronics).

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#103

Post by Terr_ »

gjs4786 wrote: post #101
geodel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats basically for everything. Do you think home insurance will pay if you burn down house every year. Or car insurance if you trash it few times a year. I see DDOS protection as kind of insurance for event happening once in a while, if it happens all the time one definitely needs something more than a free service.

Yeah, but they aren't the ones, presumably, who are DDOSing their own site. Warning: Insurance is not going to pay if YOU burn down your home /// even a little bit ///!!!

"Insurance companies hate this one weird trick."

That reminds me of an NPR piece [0] discussing how a worrying number of people seem to be getting wrong/illegal tax-advice from "influencers" on TikTok etc. I'm sure a similar thing with insurance fraud either has happened or will happen eventually.

[0] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197958760

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#104

Post by theamk »

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.)

eh no,

if there is a mistake and someone thinks I stole something, I'd like to be able to explain that I did not, rather than having false charge on my card.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#105

Post by vbezhenar »

wkat4242 wrote: post #96
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”.

Yeah and in some countries like Australia they actually demand to look in your bag even when you've done nothing suspicious. Never happened to me anywhere in Europe but many times in Australia so it must be a local law that they can do that.

Can you tell "no" and proceed home? Can they actually capture you? Sounds like nonsense to me. Why people allow that to happen?

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#106

Post by 1a527dd5 »

We recently looked at an image services for our platform. Nothing crazy a few hundred millions requests per day.

We (well I) shortlisted;

- Fastly

- Cloudflare

- Imgix

- Cloudinary

Imgix (for us) was the clear winner. We had only initially planned to use in a small performance-sensitive part of the platform. That quickly escalated (in a good way) to doing all our of public images on a custom plan. Imgix were great. We have no complaints.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#107

Post by vb-8448 »

bgentry wrote: post #88
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…

It seems like the author already went above and beyond to try to get this resolved through the proper channels. Why did it take an HN front page post to get it actually looked into? It does not inspire confidence in your service.

I recall several similar situations with Cloudflare: a user has billing/service problems and the only way to get some support is to end on HN frontpage or reddit ...

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#108

Post by yawnxyz »

miyuru wrote: post #78

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.

oh yeah that's like a joke by now... I just think of it as "subsidizing R2 and all the other things that are inexplicably free"

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#109

Post by shrubble »

adityapatadia wrote: post #71
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Is there really market demand for AVIF and JXL , and from what market segments?

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#110

Post by bluedino »

horsawlarway wrote: post #37
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 1…

They don't complain about a constant 10mbs traffic?
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