HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewstuart

Cloudflare R2 seems too good to be true. Do the economics make sense?


It's hard to believe CloudFlare R2 charges zero egress compared to 9 cents per gigabyte from all the big cloud providers.

How can it make economic sense for CloudFlare?

Will this last? Will it be cancelled?

I feel like I'm stealing when I use it, I'm so used to being charged 9 cents per GB.


  👤 vayne Accepted Answer ✓
You should read this to understand how the economics of this works: https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/

"The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3’s margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data as I would like for free — in either direction.

That’s not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives."


👤 prirun
Keep in mind that when Amazon and other hosting companies buy bandwidth, it is symmetric: they don't pay a smaller rate for ingress than egress. Charging a lot for egress is just a way (IMO) to keep customers stuck on their platform, because migrating data to another provider is expensive.

👤 db48x
9¢/GB is theft, honestly.

👤 labarilem
Cool. Anyone tried this with production workloads?