While large file delivery systems offered by other cloud companies might be sufficient for a lot of use cases, they all lack the generous framework laid down by Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s capabilities still remain mostly unprecedented on the market, especially with respect to the generous and cost-effective pricing. It comes as a surprise to me, that Cloudflare, the company that constantly extols its network capacity, does not yet offer this service. Not only is this damaging to the customer that has to remain conscious of the vague Clause 2.8 of Cloudflare’s Self-Serve Subscription Agreement and its implications, while also seeking to scale their service, but also to the company itself for actively refusing the position of a direct competitor to the biggest CDN providers out there.
I personally wouldn’t mind paying 0.10$ (or more) per gigabyte, if it meant that I could still enjoy, among other things, the security and performance benefits offered by Cloudflare. However, I believe that this feature should NOT be bundled in with Argo, as that service is far from being “mature” enough in terms of granularity.
By restricting this feature to the Enterprise plan only, Cloudflare turns away potential customers with niche requirements, that only Cloudflare can meet, or customers, whose needs scale linearly.
While I acknowledge that the pricing model I proposed might be flawed, as it does not address the possibility of abuse, I believe that it is essential that a pricing model requiring upfront/reserved fees is not used, since, in my opinion, it undermines the serverless architecture Cloudflare has championed over the years.