Again, I have been using CDNs for a while now, including one that is much larger than CloudFlare (CDNetworks), and on various occasions I have talked with Akamai to get quotes. In my book, CloudFlare reams medium-sized companies on price, and they can do that precisely because people such as yourself have miscalibrated your "I'm getting screwed" detector. (The same is true of Amazon CloudFront, btw.) In essence, once you realize people have this algorithm (specifically, where they don't even bother calling a sales person) it is trivial to exploit you by quoting a large price that you will never do comparison on (and then, rather than compete on price, you end up competing on a ton of questionable value-adds, and do price discrimination on things like 24/7 support).