To summarize your point, yes, Cloudflare is not entirely free for all. Cloudflare specifically states why they have this sort of model, from their S-1 [0]:
> Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.
That's the value they get for providing the service for 'free' for quite a lot of websites that aren't moving real data volumes. For millions of websites, this is a sweet deal for them since it still saves them hundreds of dollars in bandwidth a month while they provide enough value to CF indirectly to not be considered a loss-leading customer (in which the customer would get "the call" saying they need to start directly paying for their usage of CF).
So is it an opaque, customer-hostile pricing strategy? Sure, but even image boards doing petabytes a month serving images are within the realm of never needing to pay for their direct usage of the service since CF still sees that as a worthwhile marketing and intelligence source. It's only when you actively cause them to lose money (such as streaming video in eg. the Oceania region) or start proxying raw binaries on a domain that proxies nothing else [1] that CF doesn't see a reason to keep your domain around as a charity case.
Haha. 21x for Telestra. Total crazy. They must be getting it from someone though, but that is abysmal. Good on cloudflare for detailing it - it's not just cloudflare who is impacted, the fees charged by others are also very high in these areas.
> Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.
That's the value they get for providing the service for 'free' for quite a lot of websites that aren't moving real data volumes. For millions of websites, this is a sweet deal for them since it still saves them hundreds of dollars in bandwidth a month while they provide enough value to CF indirectly to not be considered a loss-leading customer (in which the customer would get "the call" saying they need to start directly paying for their usage of CF).
So is it an opaque, customer-hostile pricing strategy? Sure, but even image boards doing petabytes a month serving images are within the realm of never needing to pay for their direct usage of the service since CF still sees that as a worthwhile marketing and intelligence source. It's only when you actively cause them to lose money (such as streaming video in eg. the Oceania region) or start proxying raw binaries on a domain that proxies nothing else [1] that CF doesn't see a reason to keep your domain around as a charity case.
0: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...
1: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi...