alt Hacker NewsI use bunny.net for CDN and DNS.
I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.
I also like smaller, independent-ish ompanies that actually care about developers. That's why I use bunny.net, transistor.fm, Plausible Analytics.
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> I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now". > I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.
With free offerings, you’re always helping the supplier in some way. Then you become the product. Which makes it difficult to understand the value exchange; it’s much easier to do so when you’re just paying a fair sum of money.
Logically, the only thing CloudFlare would do is lower or eliminate the free usage tier. For instance, if X million operations are currently free, they make X/2 operations free. I don't think they would do that, but if they did, it couldn't possibly be existential to any viable company.
Practically, any metered supplier can put you out of business. It usually doesn't happen because destruction is mutually assured.
+1 for using smaller, more independent companies in any case!
>What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
This logic doesn't hold much water, however. Abrupt changes in pricing or other conditions happen with paid tiers as well
Well said. I use bunny.net for many of the same reasons, and to support diversity of solutions in the internet ecosystem.
A change from $2 to $3 is as likely as change from $2 to "call us for quote"
If you have the money it’s good
If the rest of the market moved to $20, why would economics of another vendor moving from $2 to $3 at the same time be plausible?
>I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".
You can just move to another provider at that point. At least when it comes to CDN and DNS there’s literally no vendor lock-in.
You can grab your dns records export them to csv and import somewhere else easily and a CDN is just a file server so you can just give your files to someone else easily.