> Additionally, there's plenty of "Upgrade to Pro" buttons sprinkled about. It's the freemium model at work.
I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts. Note that, Matthew Prince, the CEO, had outlined a few reasons why they have such a generous free tier on an Stack Exchange answer[1]. I think the biggest reason is this:
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at an incredible scale. I would actually be very interested in understanding how this vision came to be. Hope Matthew writes that book someday.
[1]: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685.
I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts. Note that, Matthew Prince, the CEO, had outlined a few reasons why they have such a generous free tier on an Stack Exchange answer[1]. I think the biggest reason is this:
> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.
Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at an incredible scale. I would actually be very interested in understanding how this vision came to be. Hope Matthew writes that book someday.
[1]: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685.