Matthew Prince Explains Why Cloudflare Will Always Offer a Free Tier
Matthew Prince on why Cloudflare offers a free version and always will
Asked on Stack Exchange how Cloudflare can give away unlimited bandwidth, CEO Matthew Prince answered directly: five reasons, and the free plan is permanent. Free users expose Cloudflare to a far wider range of attacks, refer customers and engineers, volunteer as production-scale QA, and helped solve the bandwidth chicken-and-egg problem. The payoff: 70%+ gross margins and profitability even though most users pay nothing.
Today CloudFlare has 70%+ gross margins and is profitable (EBITDA)/break even (Net Income) even with the vast majority of our users paying us nothing.