Is this why cloudflare manages to be cheap?
* Cloudflare operates at a scale where its caching saves a lot of bandwidth, which saves ISPs money, which makes Cloudflare an attractive partner for peering and co-location.
* CDN is a platform on top of which Cloudflare can offer a lot of additional services that used to be expensive dedicated middleboxes.
[1] Cloudflare decrypts your traffic, reads it, and then forwards it. They see all encrypted data going to and from your website, in plaintext.
In fact, the company vision and values (as the team grew) may have changed over the time, but originally it seems it was somewhat of a different spirit (and closer to a data collection network).