I think it being difficult to grok is the point, if they laid down exactly how much they want you to pay for bandwidth then it would be easy to go price shopping between them and the competition. But when it's "free" bandwidth, with a fuzzy line where it stops being free, and ambiguous pricing when it does, they can hook people in with a great deal and try to shake them down later.

I still encounter people who refuse to believe that CF bandwidth isn't really free, when you can easily demonstrate that it's not by just observing who uses them. If their bandwidth truly was free and unlimited with no catch whatsoever then every bandwidth giant like Imgur would use CF, but they don't. Imgur uses Fastly, probably because it's cheaper than CFs "free".

Presumably it gives them a lot more flexibility in deciding who has to pay more.

With published thresholds they’re less able to upsell someone just shy of the limit without publicly changing the tiers. Doing that has the potential to upset existing customers who are over the new limit all at once, while also providing intel to competitors looking to undercut them.

They don't want you to know where you are. It's like Kafka but the liberterian edition.

That's not how the "free until it's not" pricing model works :P

IMHO it's just the price finding model that CF has adopted, I expect in the future they'll release limit numbers... unless they decide not releasing numbers is more profitable (i.e. the used car sales pricing model)

Genuine question: Why did you use `grok` in that context?