Cloudflare CEO lists why the free CDN tier will continue
Original title: Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will
Prince cites attack data, referrals, hiring, QA, and bandwidth scale, and says margins stayed above 70%.
In a Webmasters Stack Exchange answer, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince gave five reasons the company offers a free unlimited-bandwidth CDN and said it always will. He cited broader attack visibility, customer and employee referrals, production-scale testing, and bandwidth economics from free users. He said Cloudflare had 70%+ gross margins and was EBITDA profitable and net-income break-even while most users paid nothing. The question was asked about 10 years and 9 months before the page view and later modified.
- Prince said free users expose a wider range of attacks than paid users alone.
- He said the 2015 employment acceptance rate was 1.6%.
- New features were often offered to free customers first for production-scale testing.
- He said free traffic helped regional telecoms peer locally and cut bandwidth unit costs.
- Vendors
- Cloudflare
From the original article
13 min read at webmasters.stackexchange.comBy clicking “Sign up”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy. [](https://webmasters. stackexchange.
By thatslast · webmasters.stackexchange.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.