Nobody is actively encouraging the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought. This makes zero sense. Why would an organization pay a business to reduce their AWS costs if it wasn't worth the cost to realize the savings? Cost optimization is an easy task, as you've stated - so the cost/value proposition of a business like The Duckbill Group must not be worth it according to your statement. Yet they exist and do, seemingly, well. Maybe... Just maybe, cost optimization in AWS is not easy, not straightforward, and designed to be painful enough to where smart engineers are incented to leverage Amazon's dark patterns of hiding costs at time of deployment.

You even state...

> 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.

So why is cost optimization a constant point of conversation with AWS if it's so easy? Why do outfits like Digital Ocean advertise on the notion of clear billing as a positive differentiator compared to AWS?

> Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like.

Let's take a stroll back in time. Do you think that Amazon and AWS have always posted a profit? Go look, they've posted many quarterly losses to get where they're at. That's how it works as you build a business like that. To your point - AWS does compete directly with Cloudflare in certain products, yet here we are, Cloudflare and AWS both continue to grow (negative operating income / net income are not a direct correlation of company growth BTW). A mistake you've made is around brand and reputation. Nobody thinks of AWS as a security company. Customers continue to buy Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Zscaler and, yes, Cloudflare - even though AWS offers some overlapping portfolio. Why? AWS isn't viewed as a security portfolio. Cloudflare has brand reputation in security and content distribution. And it's a pivot that easily works with both their brand and reputation.

> Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.

This just screams of the competitive argument low-road. I don't have ties to Amazon or AWS. I'm not an employee. When I read statements like this it's affirmation that there's some agenda. I laughed out loud reading that as the closing argument, thanks for that.

This comment confirms that you have a misunderstanding of how organizations can and have bought bandwidth via high-cap Internet offerings in the real world given how you've misunderstood my argument completely. My point is that organizations like AWS, Cloudflare, GCP, and many, many organizations around the world still buy Internet connectivity this way (directly). My unchanged statement, all along, has been regarding the egregious margins AWS makes on bandwidth that they charge for in a very asymmetric and oversubscribed manner. It's hard to have an conversation about these things when the basis for how businesses operate aren't understood by those making comments, unfortunately.

> His entire business depends on the fact that AWS pricing is clear and public.

I'm not sure how many enterprise agreements you've helped derive or review, but you can get agreed pricing from any cloud vendor - Cloudflare included. If you're spending any amount monthly beyond what appears to be a personal account this is not your issue.