Please consider adding a paid tier that is $5-$10/mo that has the same features as the free plan, but is not subject to beta testing. Some sites simply do not warrant all of the extra features/settings that are in the paid plan, but do benefit from the security features in the free version. As it is now, when breaks occur on free plan sites, it costs time, money, and stress for me to chase down the cause of the issue for my clients. Give that no notification from Cloudflare is ever given about changes they make, and some of those changes are hidden inside settings that only have an on/off toggle, it could take a LOT of time to discover the issue is from Cloudflare. My clients would rather pay a bit than to be subjected to beta testing and random issues.
For those of us who help multiple clients, the hoohaa that happens on free plans from beta testing falls under group support. So, lots of time chewed up searching for the issue and dealing with issues across multiple sites.
Most of my clients are on the Pro plan for their money-making sites. But they also have sites that don’t warrant that expense, or need those features. However, they would be willing to pay a little just to stay out of the beta testing.
Plus, most folks on the free plan are not webmasters and rarely check their settings. I can’t see how Cf is getting reliable feedback by doing rollouts using a percentage of sites until they eventually hit on ones that are regularly checked.
…but not $20, so they have valued their site or time at less than that.
It’s not beta testing, Cloudflare probably rolls out changes to the code base every day mostly without any impact. But someone has to be first, and it isn’t going to be paying users, especially those on Enterprise plans some of who have very bespoke and complex setups.
While you are quite free to use free and cheap plans for business, and profit from it, Cloudflare is very clear about what you should expect by how it describes the plans and the SLAs offered.
We had rather throw spaghetti against the wall with 100 changes a month that we don’t tell anybody about. And then if there is an issue on a live site, we’re fine with the few non-techies who might notice something, or the folks that caretake their sites happening to notice something amiss spending hours jumping through hoops to figure out what it is before they realize it was a Cloudflare change.
Then we want those non-techie folks to report the issue as best as they can, not knowing exactly how we would want data we would want to see, or caring if they have access to that data or not, so we can bully them about it in the only place where they can report it - which is in our community forum.
We had rather our volunteers spend their time in those forums than becoming dedicated beta testers who could help us identify problems faster and report them just the way we like it so that we can fix it faster and not impact any live site.
While all of this may sound reasonable to a dev, I very seriously doubt you could get a good business manager to sign off on it.
This post is attempting to address the idea that free folks are seen as taking advantage of Cloudflare in some way. Let them pay for an intermediate level that offers no more than the free version as far as settings. And let more qualified folks beta test in a way that saves Cloudflare money too.
Sorry you don’t get that and that you only see one way to deal with the whole of it.
I’m not Cloudflare, just a user with personal free plans and an Enterprise paying customer.
I didn’t say that, nor does Cloudflare as it is very clear what it believes free plan users offer it.
At the end of the day, the offering is what it is. If someone thinks $20 is too much for paid then they have made their own valuation of their business and time and I can’t argue with that.
I don’t read their statement that way. It appears to me that they are reaffirming they are committed to having a free plan. That does not imply that it is in exclusion to other plans that could be offered as well.
As far as your opinion about what people value - that is all it is - your opinion, not a fact. You have done nothing more than state your value and projected that onto others in a mischaracterization of how they might feel. You have zero idea how others feel. There are all kinds of site needs. And clearly you don’t factor that into your opinions.
Are you the person who authorizes plans offered by Cloudflare? If not, then that too is just your opinion.
