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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Too cheap.

It seems extremely inexpensive.

Even though it's not a direct comparison, look at https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/ (and switch to the "pay by month" pricing view)

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"Suspiciously cheap" is on-brand for an ex-Cloudflare team

I would have easily paid for any of their best in class DNS, DDoS protection or CDN, but I get all of those free unmetered. Generally when this happens, I get suspicious that they are just trying to kill the competition and then increase price, but cloudflare has been free for almost like forever.

It's no secret that those products are free* with a big asterisk, if you hit some unspecified combination of total bandwidth usage, attracting DDoSes, serving the wrong types of files or moving too much data in regions where bandwidth is expensive then you get an email from sales asking you to pay up or leave. Even if you're on a paid plan, beyond a certain (also unspecified) amount of usage they will ask you to pay more, until you end up on an Enterprise plan where you pay-per-GB just like every other CDN.

They are currently quite generous with how much you can use for free or cheap, but the limits being so vague means they are subject to change without any transparency, potentially pulling the rug on you at any time. That's what I mean by suspiciously cheap.

Do you have any source? I was initially suspicious of the same but found few content in reddit/other forums where multiple users said they have free plan and get millions of requests per day[1]. And I couldn't find a consistent reason for all the sites that cloudflare banned.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lfa1il/why_you...

Cloudflare does not have any bandwidth limits or request limits in any way. They generally do monitor high usage users on lower plans to try and upsell them to enterprise but you dont ever have to actually upgrade.

The reddit post you linked seems to not really have any content anymore, but I would be willing to bet they broke TOS given you are only really supposed to serve html content over CDN when on lower level plans when you are not using the developer platform to host the content such as videos/images/etc.

Fwiw though, if you are a business you probably should at the very least upgrade to business for the SLA and to create support tickets if needed.

edit: figured out why the article doesnt exist the OP removed it because it was an issue on his end not Cloudflares. (Using bot fight mode on a route supposed to be used by bots) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26072153

I wouldn't call charging $5/user "cheap" when a user might cost a few cents. Pure software services are supposed to have insane COGS. The free tier may eventually get reduced, but with something like this you have basically no lock-in, so I wouldn't consider that a meaningful risk.

Looks like the Jam team have some great investors who will steer them correctly but the founders need to consider whether they can raise the amounts needed the same way Matthew and Michelle (founders of CloudFlare) could back in the day - which enabled the generous CF freemium model and turned the company into the $25bn company it is today.

From a funding perspective things are very different than when CF started.

Cant really compare these at all. Hotjar is for tracking heatmaps and recordings from your regular site visitors.

Jam is for your employees to download an extension and manually submit the recordings when they have issues and is a pay per employee based model.

Jam will generally have very low volume compared to Hotjar which is where the price difference really is

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