Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y. But you don't control how much it costs them to implement it, only how much of your business you're going to take somewhere else without it, and if nobody is willing to do that then why would you expect them to spend the money?

It doesn't have to be that they're purposely screwing you. It's just that if you don't care enough to choose differently then why would they?

Exactly. There's little "win" here for the business, especially when the simpler "just cap at n requests" solution exists. Pursuing this solution:

- introduces more technical complexity (increased cost of developing, testing and maintentance)

- forces overage costs onto the vendor, who will then... increase prices to cover these costs, which upsets customers and makes the company less competitive.

- doesn't improve cost prediction (since n requests can be costed out a $/request quite easily and reliably)

(The cynical will say something about "the business has an incentive to _not_ fix this issue because they get paid for overages", but this assumes that Cloudflare has the, "monopolistic" market power to make customers unhappy and still charge whatever they want. In this case implementing billing caps wouldn't do anything because Cloudflare could just... charge whatever they want.)