i.e. it's a $10k fee for maintaining the infrastructure for a quarantine around their services
They did. Repeatedly. You see it mentioned in the few emails the OP chose to share. But they also didn't share the other communication they had over the month long discussion they had with cloudflare.
> BYOIP also costs nothing to produce.
That's not really accurate. Cloudflare is entirely built around one big unified anycast network. If you want to provision an entirely separate network that maintains all the same features they are using from the main cloudflare network, that's going to require provisioning a lot of cpu time and routing table slots at a lot of different sites plus whatever admin and engineer overhead comes from maintaining this quarantined service.
>Here's the features you get with enterprise
And
>If you do not use byoip with your service you cannot be a customer, and also pay us $120k upfront while we do not tell you why, it's only a 40x price increase. You have 24h.
As a network engineer I'm well aware of what it costs to add prefixes to what you announce over bgp, some miniscule additional CPU overhead, likely unmeasurable. Even slow mips processors could process full table bgp.
Anycast/unicast changes nothing here. Anycast simply means that the same prefix is announced in multiple different PoPs.
Except the "place" isn't Mom and Pop's bodega, it's a casino dodging countries blocking its main domain.
Edit: "How do you know?" -- I don't know it's actually what happened, but when switching to enterprise, you don't go from 10% margin to 98% margin. The added costs actually represent added budget for the provider to deal with your "special case". ALL enterprise pricing tiers are disguised consulting contracts.