Predictability matters. The whole point of paying someone else to handle a problem for you is that you don't have to worry about it. If you go all in on a provider and then suddenly find out that you've been switched to a paid plan in the middle of your vacation, that's not a place anyone wants to be. Saying there's no lock-in is nice, but that overlooks the fact that there most definitely is friction. What if there's no mass export? No mass import? Or you need to reset 2FA? Or etc, there's a thousand things that can shoot you in the foot, especially if you have a lot of services you need to migrate.

It's impossible to generalize over free vs paid in regard to predictability. E.g. a provider I paid for simply disappeared once when I was quite busy while my old free gmail still works. Realistically CF's free tier is more predictable than many paid options on market.

>What if there's no mass export? No mass import? Or you need to reset 2FA?

1. For DNS we have standardized AXFR requests which the DNS provider needs to support as they are part of the DNS standard. There is not an option of not having that unless you have a really shitty provider that you should change anyway.

2. Same for Mass Import because again DNS already defines these things at the protocol level.

And resetting 2FA or whatever is just the cost of using any service

Personally I have used CF for ~10 years so I have saved $240 and I simultaneously use GitHub Pages and CF Pages for CDN because again I just need to give them a bunch of static files. Adding a third CDN provider would literally be a single command at the end of my build pipeline.

Or your provider randomly decides you need to be on an enterprise plan: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...