Submitted 18 hours ago by early_riser@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
I’m using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I’m using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?
It costs cloudflare basically nothing to host free customers ( if you start to push real traffic you will get an instant call from sales). By being a free customer you are basically a guinea pig for all new features as they are rolled out globally.
How much traffic before the sales team comes knocking?
They have an upper limit. https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/
A couple of my products went WAAAY above that and you essentially have to get a quick standard plan. If you have this problem, congrats, you are probably doing something really well or really bad!
They are not as bad as say AWS / Azures offerings when it comes to billing. Arguably, theres a reason they are still around when there are other tools that do similar things. Used to be, it was the most solid part of the infa. Nowadays….its for some reason going down quite often. And not just the world-wide issues taht everyone else is seeing. We have a product that CANNOT go down and cloudflare has been responsible for a couple of big issues, which is really unfortunate. Its still the best “work” service for what they do, but I dont have any of my personal infa connected.
I am no expert, so grains of salt and such. But my assumption is that it’s a marketing expense. They get a lot of people familiar with cloud flare services and some of them later need a professional level solution. So people use what they are already familiar with. This is the same reason why tech companies provide hardware/software to schools for cheap/free.
@early_riser they can see all of your data going over it. They terminate the connection at their end. So data collection if nothing else. And yah what are they going to collect is the same thing people said about Google.
I’m an expert at nothing, however, the following is how I understand the relationship between your origin server and Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust services. I stand by to be schooled:
If this is inaccurate, please do EILI5. I’m always down to learn.
In what way am I the product when using CloudFlare’s free tier?
I realize the name of the game is to protect as much of your data as possible, however, unless you have your own ISP/backbone, you are, at some point, the product. I utilize the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust. For last month, I used 375.28 GiB. I don’t run the 'arr stack tho. I do, however, stream my own audio collection via Navidrome. I have had zero issues with the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, except for a brief pause while Cloudflare had some issues last month. Other than that, smooth sailing. I also have tailscale as an overlay on the server and on the stand alone pfsense firewall, which has a very robust set of rules and heavy filtering going on.
Is there another way
There are always other ways. Pangolin, et al. It just depends on you, and what you want to put in to get out of it all. If you are going this route, investigate a WAF like Crowdsec, or similar, and you might want to look at pfsense or opnsense.
You’re using a service that is proxying your data. They can read all of it.
If you don’t care, then good for you. You’re still the product as being a user because whatever you happen to be serving my eventually become interesting. If not I harm done. It costs pennies to host a 24/7 load balanced reverse proxy. You just can’t do it yourself.
If nothing else, it’s “look at all these people using our services, that’s proof we’re awesome, even on the free tier, so imagine what you’ll get if you pay us!” ¯\\(°_o)/¯
False@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
This is basically “the first hit is free”