Thread

1. jesse_dot_id · 1791077437 · focus · HN ↗

   Lot of people in these threads talk about Cloudflare like they're forcing the centralization of the Internet. There was a DDoS problem and they got there early and don't charge much, if anything, to protect your endpoints. End of that story.

   Anybody else remember when a less evil version of Google gave their engineers time to go make whatever they wanted to make? And everyone was like that's really cool — to trust your smart people to make useful things.

   Every half-baked product coming out of Cloudflare feels like some version of that. Letting your engineering teams cook to see if the end result tastes good. Some stuff doesn't. Some stuff is amazing.

   Now I have DNS, Workers, D1, R2, email, secret vault, MCP, CLI, tunnels, access, analytics, and on and on. I have like 8 Svelte apps running with decent traffic for free. And they're stable. And it feels like Cloudflare is loss-leading instead of conducting bait-and-switch enshittification. I've been using their shit for over a decade.

   Looking around the rest of the industry landscape, I'm not sure how anyone lands on Cloudflare being bad for developers/engineers. My shit is centralized because nobody else does what they do and delivers the DX that they do. I truly feel gaslit sometimes on this site.

   1. greyface- · 1791084916 · focus · HN ↗

      > Anybody else remember when a less evil version of Google gave their engineers time to go make whatever they wanted to make?

      Yes, it was great. Until Google turned evil, and the goodwill that we had given to them on the basis of all of these cool products was turned back against us. The lesson I learned from this time was that you don't give a company leverage over you just because you like what they are doing today. You should also consider where they are headed in the future.

      Why did Google turn evil? Do you think Cloudflare is immune from these same incentives? Is giving a bunch of free services away to everyone sustainable, or will they be forced to tighten the screws in the future, and if so, what will it look like when they do?

      1. jesse_dot_id · 1791091209 · focus · HN ↗

         No, Cloudflare is definitely not immune. No corporation is immune and as the world leans harder into fascism, pay-to-play becomes a concrete requirement to operate a large business. I don't think Cloudflare is completely innocent or anything. They just don't make me feel 'the ick' yet. There are some signs, like the Omarchy donation, but I also can see the business angle of supporting a project from the guy created Rails. He's going through some midlife thing, and definitely has opinions that suck, but there's a talented engineer in there somewhere.

         Businesses only care about money. That's why the Cloudflare hate feels strange to me I guess. They've been giving stuff away to devs for free that would normally be expensive, and supporting open source projects at the same time. They're not perfect but this is capitalism. Everyone sucks in some way or another. They're conducting business but at the same time, they're driving their business with loss-leading services that they're definitely losing money on. That's not a business practice I would typically attribute to an evil and soulless money machine. I'm not naive either, I've been waiting for them to begin enshittifying for at least 5 years. They just never seem to.

         1. dingaling · 1791094314 · focus · HN ↗

            "They've been giving stuff away to devs for free"

            It's not free, it moves the cost onto the users of those services. I have to pay with my time and my data.

            Or, increasingly, I hit backspace as soon as I see the Cloudflare logo. Who's going to pay when the users don't?

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