I’m using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I’m using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?
I’m using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I’m using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?
I am no expert, so grains of salt and such. But my assumption is that it’s a marketing expense. They get a lot of people familiar with cloud flare services and some of them later need a professional level solution. So people use what they are already familiar with. This is the same reason why tech companies provide hardware/software to schools for cheap/free.
Developers, like me, use the free tier for staging and testing and then when the project is deployed to production, I setup a paid account for the client.
I also use their domain registrar and sometimes buy CDN bandwidth in complex setups.