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Comment by unmole | Hacker News Reader

The prices seem incredible. Will Cloudflare actually make any money off this?

Storage is $15/TB/Month. Commodity hard drives currently go for around $17/TB.

Considering data is replicated across several hard drives, servers and electricity aren’t free, etc. I would guess that Cloudflare won’t break even on storage until several months of utilization (unlike Amazon who probably breaks even on day 1).

I guess in the long term the product will at least pay for itself, in the short term it will just be a marketing campaign and gives people a good reason to switch from their Amazon stack in case they don't depend on things like EC2-S3 transfers. When comparing to Backblaze B2 [1], Cloudflare's storage cost is 3x but you don't pay for egress as a tradeoff (compared to 0.01$/GB for Backblaze).

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

You are comparing monthly price with lifetime price.

That makes sense since they're calculating the time it takes to amortize the hardware purchase.

I think the real question is "How much money is Amazon extracting from users?"

Egress pricing 100 times lower than Amazon could be realistic (S3 egress costs between $50/TB and $90/TB, while Hetzner bills 1 EUR/TB, and Cloudflare is bigger than Hetzner).

Free egrees is weird. In particular using R2 to offer videos or other big downloads appears to be unrealistically cheap.

A $1/TB offer would still be very appealing, while allowing Cloudflare to break even on traffic-heavy use-cases.

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