story
I'd always prefer paying for certainty than design a solution built on a lottery.
Using any "free" service is generally not free as you scale. That's the freemium model we live in today.
> Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth.
This is an unfortunate assumption with nothing to go on at this point. There is no more certainty with AWS, as implied in your statement, than with any other cloud provider. Not all organizations have an end goal in being the scale of AWS. And not all organizations put profit over product with respect to an outdated perspective that said organizations need to grow 40% YoY for all of eternity to be successful. It's now, more than ever, very clear that AWS profit margins on data transfer are egregious and they spin the backpedal as "Oh - look at us dropping prices, for you, our esteemed customer!". This is the real marketing slight of hand here, not the other way around.
I have been screwed, personally, by enough "free" and "unlimited" offerings to never believe them.
On AWS, all the price changes I've had have been to reduce my costs. This is over a pretty long period.
So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.
Google, sure, they could cancel or 3x your bill (hi Maps API customers etc). AWS does not have that history.
Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing. Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.
There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words.
Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn.
> So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.
I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS than with any other major cloud provider with respect to your statement about public companies who "eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth". And then for some reason you pivoted to your own, personal, AWS bill from there. I'm not exactly following the logic.
> Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing.
At this point I'm not sure if your comment is even serious. First of all, please elaborate on "secret pricing". Sounds like serious charges we should all be aware of. Maybe it's with the article from 2019 on The Register about domain pricing? That's not exactly in the context of this thread, but please enlighten the masses.
> Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.
I'd charge you with the same ask on AWS. You seem to imply the "free" tier, on AWS, will provide proper capabilities to host an adult content site. I have strong doubts about this. The logic of this argument is ill conceived at best. Or is your logic just that you can't do this on Cloudflare and that's the root of your argument on why AWS is better? Again, I'm not exactly following your train of thought.
[0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-compelling-economics-...
Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable history of screwing customers.
AWS is offering clear pricing, cloudflare is not. It's really that simple.
This makes me realize that folks just don't understand the value AWS is providing, and is perhaps why they can charge such insane prices.
People with actual money to spend don't want "free" because they don't believe it's actually free.
In terms of cloudflare, they have something like a negative 60% operating margin. The idea of building a business on a company with a negative 60%+ operating margin is insane, either they will go bust or have to raise prices.
AWS by contrast makes money. Because of this, they can shave a point or two off margin to give (another) price reduction.
1TB per month cloudfront, 2M cloudfront functions etc etc. They are under almost NO financial pressure to raise rates.
Cloudflare is under pressure or will be. With VC money perhaps they will get a longer runway.
The "free" offerings are an old story by now.
I'm still using free tier Google Apps in multiple places, even though they haven't offered new free accounts for about ten years now. They even still let you create new users for free in these legacy GApps.
Interestingly, I would likely migrate off of GApps to a different paid service if Google changed their minds, however I don't think they have a strong incentive to apply pressure here at long as Gmail.com accounts are free.
