Cloudflare
A connectivity cloud platform offering security, performance, and networking services including CDN, DDoS protection, SASE, and developer tools.
Key Features
- ✓DDoS protection and WAF (Web Application Firewall)
- ✓Content Delivery Network (CDN) for performance acceleration
- ✓SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) with Cloudflare One
- ✓Bot protection and API security
- ✓AI agent framework and orchestration tools
- ✓Zero Trust network access
- ✓Global cloud network connectivity
What Cloudflare Actually Is
Cloudflare started as a CDN and DDoS protection layer you could put in front of a website. Today it is something considerably bigger: a global connectivity cloud that spans networking, security, compute, storage, and developer tooling. Its network spans over 300 cities worldwide, and all traffic you route through it benefits from that infrastructure from day one.
At its core, Cloudflare sits between your users and your origin server. DNS resolves to Cloudflare, traffic passes through their edge, and you get caching, security filtering, and performance benefits automatically. That single architectural decision unlocks a large portion of what the platform can do.
Who It Is For
The most frequent use case cited by reviewers is website security, and the majority of Cloudflare's users come from the information technology and services sector. But that framing undersells the developer angle. Cloudflare has built a serious compute layer with Workers (V8 isolate-based serverless), D1 (SQLite at the edge), R2 (S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees), and Pages for static and JAMstack deployments. If you are building a web application from scratch and want to avoid managing infrastructure, the Cloudflare developer platform is a genuine contender.
It also makes sense for teams running existing infrastructure who need to bolt on DDoS mitigation, WAF rules, bot protection, or Zero Trust access without rearchitecting their stack.
Pricing Overview
Cloudflare's pricing combines tiered subscription plans with usage-based pricing. The tiers are Free, Pro ($20/month per domain), Business ($200/month per domain), and Enterprise (custom pricing) for core CDN and security services. Many products charge based on requests and bandwidth.
| Plan | Price | Good For |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Personal sites, experimentation |
| Pro | $20/month | Blogs, startups, basic WAF |
| Business | $200/month | SMBs needing custom SSL, advanced WAF |
| Enterprise | Custom | Large orgs, SLA guarantees, China network |
Workers and Pages follow separate pricing: the Workers Free tier covers basic usage, while Workers Paid starts at $5/month and scales based on requests. R2 charges per GB stored and per operation, but the absence of egress fees is a meaningful differentiator compared to AWS S3.
One honest caveat: Cloudflare's website is vague about the Free plan's "reasonable use" threshold, making it unclear exactly when usage becomes an issue or what practical features each paid tier actually adds.
Strengths Worth Noting
The free tier is unusually capable. You get real DDoS protection, global CDN, managed DNS, and SSL without paying anything. For smaller projects this is hard to beat.
Workers offers a near-instant isolate model that avoids the cold start latency that Lambda@Edge and other serverless platforms can encounter, especially on less popular routes. That matters in latency-sensitive applications.
One real user noted that Cloudflare removed most bot attacks to their streaming media and reduced bandwidth costs by 40%, finding it excellent value at $20/month for their traffic level. Results like that explain the platform's loyalty among developers who have been on it for years.
Limitations to Know Before Committing
Free and Pro plans only get ticket-based support, which can be slow. Advanced features like image optimization and load balancing are gated to higher tiers.
The deeper concern is lock-in. The more of the stack you use (Workers, D1, R2, Queues, AI Gateway), the more tightly coupled you become to Cloudflare's runtime and APIs. With Workers AI specifically, you are constrained to Cloudflare's curated model catalog, with limited control over versions, fine-tuning, or custom models, and inference runs inside Cloudflare's managed environment.
Support at the free and pro tiers is community-forum quality. If you have a production incident and are not on an Enterprise plan, you are largely on your own.
Bottom Line
Cloudflare is one of those tools where the free tier alone justifies setting it up, and the platform grows with you if you want it to. For pure CDN, DNS, and DDoS protection it remains the default choice for most developers. The developer platform (Workers, R2, D1) is genuinely good, but if you go deep on it, treat the lock-in risk as a real architectural decision, not an afterthought.
