I think in Cloudflare’s case the free tier website owners are more an example of just giving the users a limited product in hopes of enticing them to upgrade to the paid product with more features and better performance. Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot, but I don’t think that really gives the same ROI like Facebook or other services extract from their “free” services where the users are the actual product.
Actually, they’ve said that their free tier is what gives them a paid tier to sell to other people. They know most people aren’t going to buy anything from them, but the are fine with that because they get to collect a ton of data about who is using hundreds of thousands of websites in order to figure out what traffic is bad. Without that huge user base, they can’t do what they do.
And judging from the article, it’s working out for them.
Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot
It lets them get a very wide base to test products against, which in and of itself, is a huge benefit. They can test out far more edge-cases than anyone else in the industry at the moment.
The anti-AI shield and bot-fight mode are free, you don’t need to pay anything to use them.
No I’m telling Perplexity, they can just buy their obstacle
People who use the things you have described, for free are themselves the products being sold
this is implied in the price
I think in Cloudflare’s case the free tier website owners are more an example of just giving the users a limited product in hopes of enticing them to upgrade to the paid product with more features and better performance. Cloudflare might get some benefit in the ability to track end-users across more websites as part of their efforts to determine who is a real human versus a potentially-malicious bot, but I don’t think that really gives the same ROI like Facebook or other services extract from their “free” services where the users are the actual product.
Actually, they’ve said that their free tier is what gives them a paid tier to sell to other people. They know most people aren’t going to buy anything from them, but the are fine with that because they get to collect a ton of data about who is using hundreds of thousands of websites in order to figure out what traffic is bad. Without that huge user base, they can’t do what they do.
And judging from the article, it’s working out for them.
It lets them get a very wide base to test products against, which in and of itself, is a huge benefit. They can test out far more edge-cases than anyone else in the industry at the moment.
It’s a spectrum and Cloudflare has snuffed out or gobbled up quite everyone they need to before the end the honeymoon phase.