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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?

#131

Post by ghoul2 »

Honestly, the main point of the story here isn't the weird billing processes.

Its, yet again, the utter refusal by CF to provide even basic support. Even for paying users. Even for users who bought the so-called "pro" plan, mainly so that they can access the support that comes with it.

I myself had a metering/billing issue that:

1. I first posted on the forum. Instead of responding there, I was told by staff to raise a ticket. 2. No response to the ticket. Autoclosed after ~1 month. 3. I immediately reopen it. No response, autoclosed after ~1 month. 4. Repeat, for 5 months. 5. Then, I wrote an angry rant in the ticket, and finally the support response arrives: "the customer is misinterpreting the reported numbers, they mean X, not Y". Fair, enough, not obvious from the UI, but could you not have told me this without so much ... friction?

I love what CF has built (I even own a small amount of stock!). Its not perfect, but its far more of a serveless/cloud model than any other player. Makes so many things so much easier.

But, _PLEASE_, CF: improve tooling, and commit to a basic level of support.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#132

Post by panja »

ricardobeat wrote: post #87

I can recommend Bunny CDN ( https://bunny.net ). You'll pay $20/month for storing 2TB, then a fixed $9.95/month to use their image optimization service with unlimited requests. And it might even perform better.

Does bunny offer a similar service to Cloudflare proxy yet?

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#133

Post by horsawlarway »

bluedino wrote: post #110
horsawlarway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope. I'm paying for a business line. I'm using what's allocated to that business line (actually FAR under what's allocated most times).

Every now and then I get a rep calling trying to upsell me, and that's about it.

At the end of 2 years they wanted to renew me. So my strong suspicion is they don't care in the slightest.

I'll add - I've also done this on a consumer Google Fiber line (which is more restrictive in the sense that contractually I can't host paid services). They also don't blink an eye when I push out 10mbps (or 500mpbs) over extended periods.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#134

Post by jallmann »

judge2020 wrote: post #82
jallmann wrote: post #80

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 rend…

My CF billing seems to be "day of the month" which might explain the differing prices based on the month; R2 storage is supposedly "GB-month" but I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually GB-hour on the backend. Does it follow that scale (e.g. June with 30 days should be ~96.8% the cost of May's 31 days)?

Interesting ... I checked and the difference is closer to 5% ($0.99 May vs $1.04 June), and June's invoice was actually higher than May's. They are billing that amount because the storage amount itself is fluctuating (alternating 66 and 69 GB) with zero writes / deletes to the bucket since around March, and staying well within the free tier for reads. Will probably have to leave it be as one of the mysteries of life :)

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#135

Post by soulshake »

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…

What contact info did you use? My partner is the author of this blog post, and neither of us has been contacted by Cloudflare that we know of. My original ticket number was 3029706 but it seems to have disappeared after the support platform migration.

Re: Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

#136

Post by zaidf »

soulshake wrote: post #135
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…

What contact info did you use? My partner is the author of this blog post, and neither of us has been contacted by Cloudflare that we know of. My original ticket number was 3029706 but it seems to have disappeared after the support platform migration.

Hi, just responded to Jérôme's email. I originally sent a twitter DM and will continue over email now that we are connected.
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