Well, It’s just that at a certain scale and business seriousness you will pay to guarantee certain levels of service which is why CF isn’t putting everything out of business. But CF’s “unguaranteed tier” is still high tier services for free.
Yes, the free tier is in fact pretty amazing if you have mid-traffic-or-lower site and are mostly serving HTML pages and basic images, js, and css for those pages, and the stakes for availability are pretty low. Which describes quite a bit of the Web.
Sure, I'm fine with that. The problem is that I don't know how much it'll cost if I fall out of their free tier.
If I go with Bunny.net, I can get bandwidth for $0.005/GB (on their volume tier with 10 PoPs) or $0.01/GB (on their standard tier with 114 PoPs). $1,000 will buy me 200TB of bandwidth on their volume tier. If I'm using 200TB on Cloudflare, what is that going to cost me? $500? $10,000? Fastly's list price is $0.12/GB for the first 10TB + $0.08/GB after that so their price would be $16,400. And I'm sure that at 200TB/mo, I wouldn't be paying Fastly's list price, but at least I have an upper bound on the pricing. With Cloudflare, I really don't know.
> "use it and hope for the best, 'till you get a notification from CloudFlare"
I'd be fine with this if there were a 30-day migration window that I'd get (or something like that). The problem is that there have been a few stories of Cloudflare moving very quickly against a customer's usage.
[EDIT] However, you're right that the lack of even limited pricing transparency makes relying on CloudFlare at lower levels risky because it's hard to know what kind of expenses you might, later, be exposed to.
i’m building something more serious which will also serve video, and will go with bunny for this reason.
negotiation is fine, but should be optional. which tiny startup wants to negotiate with every vendor?
They're not actually giving away service that others charge thousands of dollars a month for, for free. If they were, most of those others would be out of business. Their free and self-paid tiers are nice and can even be good deals (you really get a lot out of that top-tier self-serve plan, for the money—watch out, some of the lower ones didn't have any SLA at all, last I checked) but if you're pushing serious bits, you're gonna end up pushed to a thousands-a-month enterprise plan.
TL;DR unless you've got an enterprise plan with them, yeah, "use it and hope for the best, 'till you get a notification from CloudFlare" is pretty much how their plans work.