Free plan for business use

Gasp!

We’re a business, and plan to use the business plan in production.

We have a staging environment that the public cannot access. We want to be able to use CF on the staging environment, for testing purposes, etc.

So the plan is to have both the live and staging sites on CF, but obviously we don’t want to be paying for the staging environment when it gets less traffic than your average WP blog.

Is this permissible? We don’t want to get into any kind of bother and if it isn’t, we’d simply not run the staging environment through CF at all.

What’s the situation with this?

Thanks.

Hi @miketansey A free plan for business use will be fine whatever data you use. Cloudflare don’t put limits on usage etc. Hope this helps

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Hi, Dan.

Thanks for your reply.

We assumed if we were to use the free plan, on a site owned by a business, that CF would get very cross and cut us off.

The assumption was that the onus is on us to choose the correct plan for our situation.

We will still use the business plan for production, but you’re saying we can have any sites including production on a free plan if we so wished?

If so, this opens up the possibilities considerably. We can have production using a business plan, and a few other testing, development environments running through a free plan.

Is this the case?

Thanks again.

Hi @miketansey yes that’s correct - pro plan at $20 will get you 20 page rules (only 3 page rules free plan) ; web firewall etc so could be worth using pro plan for non public environment etc.

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Absolutely. Please feel free to pick the plan that has the features and services which work best for you. We have no issues with business customers using our free plans and often even at the Enterprise level we will have customers with a mix of free plans and others as needed.

There are obviously some differences between the plans so if you’re using a feature on a BIZ plan that you want to test against a free plan, that can sometimes be challenging, but you might be able to use a test subdomain of the BIZ account for some of that testing as well.

In some geographies there may also be differences in the POP you use which can skew some of the performance related testing as they are using different routes, but that’s relatively rare overall. :slight_smile:

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Coming back to revisit this… the answer re: plan types for business hasn’t changed, but I did want to mention that between using Zone Lockdown and Access there are now more options for testing against a staging environment using a unique subdomain of your production environment if you wish without having to make that available to the general public.

There are still plenty of reasons I might choose to use a unique staging domain, but Zone Lockdown and Access are being used by a number of my customers where the primary concerns were around public access to the staging environment.