It's a good move for them but it's problematic for anybody who cares about a decentralized Internet.

No, consolidation within the tech industry has never been good for workers or open source development. For someone who considers themselves as part of the open source community I've been extremely disappointed how anti-worker and pro-corporation you come across.

Don't worry you aren't unique in this regard, many other nonworking dev influencers say similar things: never championing for workers but somehow always championing positions that help investors + corporations first and foremost

I don't think that's necessarily true. Certainly the video streaming is expensive, but other things like workers and KV store are quite cheap and performant and powerful _if you structure your access patterns accordingly_ .

Cloudflare pricing introduces an additional dimension for when you're architecting software on top of them, but if you do it correctly, your product has the potential to be faster, cheaper, and easier to run than traditional solutions running on multiple geographically distributed VMs. You just can't approach them as if they're just another VM instance provider and expect a similar experience and pricing. What they do and price for is fundamentally different from that.

Maybe it depends on product offering. WAF + CDN was competitive with Akamai (through a VAR) and AWS and came with free Zero Trust seats.

Iirc Argo and some other routing products are quite expensive.

I cannot agree more. Cloudflare has some services that are really cheap (r2) to lure you into their worker "ecosystem", which is just serverless. Once you are vendor locked into their absolute garbage custom JavaScript runtime, you are pretty much forced to use their distributed database Cloudflare KV if you want good performance. Cloudflare KV is so extremely ridiculously absurdly expensive that make predatory pricing of vercel that HN likes to complain about feel like child play.