This deserves an updoot. We reached a level of scale right now at Checkly that all of these things start adding up. We moved workloads off of S3 to Cloudflare R2 because of this.
let me nuance that a bit. 99% of our workload is write heavy and is still on S3. We run monitoring checks that snap a screenshot and record a video. We write that to S3. Most folks will never view any of that as most checks pass and these artefacts only become interesting when things fail.
Enter a new product feature we launched (Visual Regression Testing) which requires us to fetch an image from storage on every "run" we do. These could be every 10sec. This is where R2 shines. No egress cost for us. It's been rock solid and saved us about 60x compared to AWS. Still, we run most of our infra on AWS.
I do not and I'm likely misusing the word subsidized.
My concern is that as a newer product (R2 in 2022 [1] compared to S3 2006 [2]) R2 has deliberately priced itself to compete with egress pricing of S3 in order to gain market share and developer mindshare. I am not confident Cloudflare will maintain this competitive pricing indefinitely as I expect it to follow well established industry trends of jacking up prices once a walled garden has been sufficiently establed.
Further its my opinion cloud costs have grown at an absurd level as engineers and executives made poor and frankly lazy technology choices for the last decade.
Ultimately I like cloudflare a lot but I think we need more discipline and lower operational overhead if we want infrastructure development to remain practical to individuals and small businesses versus mega-corps. Cloudflare with its free pricing tiers is often a default choice for these organizational sizes but it should not be viewed as a panacea and carries tradeoffs as with everything in life.
