Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post:

if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+

I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate this further. Also happy to chat with anyone else with questions or issues (zaid at cloudflare)

> It’s likely that we will replace Cloudflare Images in the long run. Looking at storage costs alone, S3 would be 4 times less expensive for our use-case.

Cloudflare R2 would likely be a good choice too, if you're willing to bet that the (inevitable?) shakedown for money once you find the limits of "unlimited egress with no fees" won't be too bad.

To summarize, I think this issue comes down to the fact CF didn't design well around the scenario that someone may upgrade their image storage capacity multiple times in a billing cycle, which seems to be the case for the author. If you only upgrade zero or once each cycle, it's not too bad.

I understand they want it to be prepaid. But I wonder why they don't just do the calculation upfront and charge you the difference (times the remaining days in the billing cycle) every time you upgrade.

In my opinion, CF Images is best if you use it with a Worker in front and R2 as storage, as you have (most) all the convenience of R2, the CDN, and CF Images, but without the unusual pricing.

Perhaps it's time I did a write-up on how to do this - it works very well for the purposes of our SaaS[1] at least :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29474743

[1] https://instorier.com/

I was evaluating image hosts a while ago. CF Images seemed promising but I was afraid that my use-case would grow to become cost-prohibitive, and I really didn't want to deal with a migration off it later. So I settled on rolling-my-own with R2 and ffmpeg to pre-generate a few renditions [1].

In short, R2 billing is weird. I actually haven't updated my bucket in months and yet the storage amount fluctuates a bit month-to-month. (Is R2 storage accounting probabilistic?!?) I also got hit by a billing line item in May for "R2 late usage" from Feb to March which I could not find any information about.

Their support only recently got back to me, with a very unhelpful / irrelevant answer of course.

The amounts involved are only ~$1 so I don't care too much - I was mostly curious - and I don't blame them for maybe not wanting to expend too much effort looking into irregularities on such a tiny account.

No regrets though. Using CF Images would still be 5x more expensive month-to-month even at my (tiny) scale. The $5-per-100k flat-rate is probably the thing that allows them to make any money on image hosting.

[1] Word to the wise - there are a lot of subtleties around building production-scale image hosting that often times it may be much easier to simply pay the premium for a managed service. For example, what if you want to only generate renditions just-in-time to save on storage? What about updating your rendition list on the fly, eg adding a new one, or even removing older ones from storage? When / how often should you sweep storage of unused renditions?

Maybe Cloudinary is more expensive (though not by a lot for our use case) but I can say that nobody has had to log in or think about it for months. The thing just works.

Most of the CF add-on services seem to be hobby-quality. We used to use their video stream/encoding service too but have since switched to another more robust platform.

We had negotiated a contract with a fixed capacity and overage charges for when we went over them. They estimated our usage for six months out and twelve months out, then spread the fixed cost out across two six month periods, billing monthly. So in effect, we would be paying for capacity six months in advance that we didn’t need, progressively getting closer to accurate billing.

The real problem came about ten months into the contract. We went over the fixed capacity. Still, no problem, right? That’s what the overage charges are for. Nope! They just switched our service off, causing us downtime.

They fixed it by manually applying a random amount of credit. Which we weren’t billed for. After that, they were really keen to negotiate a new fixed contract, even though they weren’t billing us for the overage charges.

We couldn’t figure it out at first because they were behaving very strangely about a bunch of things. Eventually we realised that there was one thing that explained all their weird behaviour: they just hadn’t implemented overage handling at all. They had no way of stopping our service from being automatically disabled when we went over our limit; the only way they could fix it was to manually apply credit; and the only way they had to bill us for the overages was to negotiate a new contract.

I’m still not certain if that was the case, but it was the only explanation we could come up with, and they were less than forthcoming about it all. The whole service was an absolute shitshow in many other ways as well; it was beta quality at best and they had no interest in fixing the issues. So can I believe they just didn’t implement overages? Yup.

This is such weasel wording. It's frustrating because it's most likely true and the people writing it are probably not lying and honestly swamped.

But considering that growth is the main purpose of most companies like this... by definition, they will at nearly all times be dealing with unprecedented demand!

It’s an interesting concept, a corollary would be walking into a physical store and being treated as a thief, until you check out and make payment. (in fact the opposite is true generally as they check your receipt on exit, or you walk through the magnetometers on exit). I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, just making an observation.

I received an invoice for cloudflare domains with incorrect billing period when I renewed it early. It calculated the billing period from the date invoice was created, instead of the the actual year in the future I was renewing it for.

It was not a huge issue, but I reported it via support and they acknowledge the issue. This was in 2023.

Doesn’t inspire confidence.

Especially no customer service response for months for paying customers.

We (well I) shortlisted;

- Fastly

- Cloudflare

- Imgix

- Cloudinary

Imgix (for us) was the clear winner. We had only initially planned to use in a small performance-sensitive part of the platform. That quickly escalated (in a good way) to doing all our of public images on a custom plan. Imgix were great. We have no complaints.

Its, yet again, the utter refusal by CF to provide even basic support. Even for paying users. Even for users who bought the so-called "pro" plan, mainly so that they can access the support that comes with it.

I myself had a metering/billing issue that:

1. I first posted on the forum. Instead of responding there, I was told by staff to raise a ticket. 2. No response to the ticket. Autoclosed after ~1 month. 3. I immediately reopen it. No response, autoclosed after ~1 month. 4. Repeat, for 5 months. 5. Then, I wrote an angry rant in the ticket, and finally the support response arrives: "the customer is misinterpreting the reported numbers, they mean X, not Y". Fair, enough, not obvious from the UI, but could you not have told me this without so much ... friction?

I love what CF has built (I even own a small amount of stock!). Its not perfect, but its far more of a serveless/cloud model than any other player. Makes so many things so much easier.

But, _PLEASE_, CF: improve tooling, and commit to a basic level of support.

Seriously though, it feels like support exists as a hurdle to get to engineering. I have never had a serious issue that was resolved by support. I miss when customer engineers or customer support actually was treated like a value add part of the business.

The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float".

Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle.

This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.

That's literally their business model.

https://expatcircle.com/cms/why-you-should-never-use-cloudfl...