Helping out a useful service? Though who knows really. Cost of services and the price they are sold at are only loosely correlated!

Though honestly it’s totally possible that cloudflare was offering a real discount but it’s still just very high for something like sourcehut.

Maybe they were misquoted, who knows. Connections are a nice thing to have and I've never felt bad about asking, knowing the answer could full well be no, but a second opinion is useful when your business is on the line.