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Ask HN: Cloudflare R2 seems too good to be true. Do the economics make sense?

8 points by andrewstuart ↗ HN
It's hard to believe CloudFlare R2 charges zero egress compared to 9 cents per gigabyte from all the big cloud providers.

How can it make economic sense for CloudFlare?

Will this last? Will it be cancelled?

I feel like I'm stealing when I use it, I'm so used to being charged 9 cents per GB.

8 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] thread
db48x
9¢/GB is theft, honestly.
PaulHoule
I’m not sure if R2 is sustainable but AWS’s egress rates are outrageous. The flip side though is that high egress rates make quite a few problems, like customers using the service to distribute pirate copies of media, go away.
4ensic
Oddly, Cloudflare is part of the Bandwidth Alliance - a consortium of 19 companies who want to reduce bandwidth costs.

Backblaze, an online storage and backup company, is also a member. They charge $.005/GB/month for S3 compatible storage. And if you map and access a bucket through Cloudflare there is no egress fee.

So it's possible to store and access your files at 1/3 the price of Cloudflare alone by using Cloudflare (plus Backblaze).

austinpena
The bandwidth alliance only applies to serving web content. Backblaze and R2 are not exactly aimed at the same market
tinus_hn
Also on the other side the ISPs are salivating at that kind of money and trying to force the large companies into paying more for the bandwidth the end users are already paying for.
prirun
Keep in mind that when Amazon and other hosting companies buy bandwidth, it is symmetric: they don't pay a smaller rate for ingress than egress. Charging a lot for egress is just a way (IMO) to keep customers stuck on their platform, because migrating data to another provider is expensive.
vayne
You should read this to understand how the economics of this works: https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/

"The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3’s margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data as I would like for free — in either direction.

That’s not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives."

labarilem
Cool. Anyone tried this with production workloads?