You pay for storage. Only , not as much as what AWS charges.
Cloudflare has a business model where they can basically handle any network load you throw at them.
They are monetizing their advantage here by allowing you to make full use of their network as long as you make use of their paid storage as well.
The margins in the cloud business and AWS especially are breathtakingly large and yet, considered affordable by enterprises so far because the alternative of standing up your own compute and networking capacity is not just significantly expensive, there just isn’t enough talent available in the world to go around for every enterprise to have a decently staffed team doing so.
The short answer is that at AWS/Cloudflare scale you’re paying a fixed cost for networking capacity, not for transit per byte. So their cost doesn’t scale anywhere near the way AWS egress costs do, and if they want it can just be free.
Yup, precisely. They buy “capacity” ie the equivalent of making an infrastructure investment. AWS does the same.
Now, AWS chooses to price their network usage as a utility, ie, you pay per unit of data transmitted. This is ridiculous for enterprise scale.
Cloudflare uses their purchased capacity as a strategic differentiator by basically letting you use as much as you want because they have so much purchased, you wouldn’t ever make a dent.
Any services behind this differentiator are what they can charge for. Like I said above, the margins in cloud are ridiculously high. This is why these companies are amongst the few in the world valued over a Trillion dollars. Throw in an upstart who has the strategic advantage and technical competence that Cloudflare has and boy, do we have a winner . The next few years will be very interesting.
