The "economies of scale" defense of Cloudflare ignores a fundamental reality: 23.8 million websites run on Cloudflare's free tier versus only 210,000 paying customers or so. Free users are not a strategic asset. They are an uncompensated cost, full stop. Cloudflare doesn't absorb this loss out of altruism; they monetize it by building AI bot-detection systems, charging for bot mitigation, and extracting threat intelligence data. Today's outage was caused by a bug in Cloudflare's service to combat bots.

That's AI bots, BTW. Bots like Playwright or Crawl4AI, which provide a useful service to individuals using agentic AI. Cloudflare is hostile to these types of users, even though they likely cost websites nothing to support well.

The "scale saves money" argument commits a critical error: it counts only the benefits of concentration while externally distributing the costs.

Yes, economies of scale exist. But Cloudflare's scale creates catastrophic systemic risk that individual companies using cloud compute never would. An estimated $5-15 billion was lost for every hour of the outage according to Tom's Guide. That cost didn't disappear. It was transferred to millions of websites, businesses, and users who had zero choice in the matter.

Again, corporations shitting on free users. It's a bad habit and a dark pattern.

Even worse, were you hoping to call an Uber this morning for your $5K vacation? Good luck.

This is worse than pure economic inefficiency. Cloudflare operates as an authorized man-in-the-middle to 20% of the internet, decrypting and inspecting traffic flows. When their systems fail, not due to attacks, but to internal bugs in their monetization systems, they don't just lose uptime.

They create a security vulnerability where encrypted connections briefly lose their encryption guarantee. They've done this before (Cloudbleed), and they'll do it again. Stop pretending to have rational arguments with irrational future outcomes.

The deeper problem: compute, storage, and networking are cheap. The "we need Cloudflare's scale for DDoS protection" argument is a circular justification for the very concentration that makes DDoS attractive in the first place. In a fragmented internet with 10 CDNs, a successful DDoS on one affects 10% of users. In a Cloudflare-dependent internet, a DDoS, or a bug, affects 50%, if Cloudflare is unable to mitigate (or DDoSs themselves).

Cloudflare has inserted themselves as an unremovable chokepoint. Their business model depends on staying that chokepoint. Their argument for why they must stay a chokepoint is self-reinforcing. And every outage proves the model is rotten.

hang on, you're reading some kind of cloudflare advocacy in my post. apologies if i implied that. i don't like to come off as a crank is all. IMO cloudflare is an evil that needs to be defeated. i'm just explaining how their business model "works" and why massive economy of scale matters, to support the GP poster.

i don't even think they are evil because of the concentration of power, that's just a problematic issue. the evil part is they convince themselves they aren't the bad guys. that they are saving us from ourselves. that the things they do are net positives, or even absolute positives. like the whole "let's defend the internet from AI crawlers" position they appointed themselves sheriff on, that i think you're referencing. it's an extremely dangerous position we've allowed them to occupy.

> they monetize it

yes, and they can't do this without the scale.

> scale saves money

any company, uber for example, can design their infra to not rely on a sole provider. but why? their customers aren't going to leave in droves when a pretty reliable provider has the occasional hiccup. so it's not worth the cost, so why shouldn't they externalize it? uber isn't in business to make the internet a better place. so yes, scale does save money. you're arguing something at a higher principle than how architectural decisions are made.

i'm not defending economy of scale as a necessary evil. i'm just backing up that it's how cloudflare is built, and that it is in fact useful to customers.