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Comment by compootr | Hacker News Reader

> Cloudflare CDN bandwidth is free of charge

free of charge, until sales shows up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

Also, unless something's changed, the free tier only technically covers "web content". Going outside HTML and related material directly supporting the display of ordinary web pages (javascript referenced by your HTML, some light image serving, CSS) puts you outside what's covered by the TOS. You can't count on it for that at all.

IIRC that also goes for the other "self serve" plans, so includes paid plans. You need an enterprise plan (probably $5k+/m) to distribute non-Web-page-related files without violating the TOS. People often get away with it as long as they don't go too wild, but you're in even riskier territory than one already is using non-enterprise Cloudflare.

Cloudflare does allow R2 (& some other "Developer Platform" services) for non-HTML content. They made some TOS changes in the past to be more explicit about it.

wait a minute the docs say (https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2)

You can use R2 for multiple scenarios, including but not limited to:

Storage for cloud-native applications Cloud storage for web content Storage for podcast episodes Data lakes (analytics and big data) Cloud storage output for large batch processes, such as machine learning model artifacts or data sets

Yes. The html-only is for services you don't have an extra agreement on. r2 has thar extra asterisk since you're paying per operation

thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize they split them into two different buckets of users / usages

It's not "until sales shows up", it's until regulators start causing problems for Cloudflare because you are using Cloudflare infra to host a grey market online gambling website.

Notwithstanding the content of the site, I think it's pretty scummy to send an email insinuating that you're stressing CF's network, only to get some non-specific information, and a call with sales.

Yeah, it's very much a "try it, first one is free" type of business.

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