Author did a surprisingly good job hanging on to all the receipts to support his claim "cloudflare bad." But his alternatives are all CDN providers - which is not even the side of the business that makes cloudflare unique and makes them money. The piece, thorough as it may be, does not offer alternatives to products that cover the exciting parts of their business and I was looking forward to seeing what those were - for example tailscale or Pangolin (Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels) or equivalents for serverless/edge compute. This makes it feel as if the author does not _really_ understand cloudflare's role/position and that this article is just a collection of links that report of the company's (valid) imperfections. For example, their workers platform, DDoS protection, and software-defined network functions (WAN, firewall, Zero-trust, etc) have made my life as a developer in my last few roles very productive and successful. And migrating away from those services was just as easy as signing up.
It might sound like I am defending cloudflare, but I am not. I share the author's concern about them becoming a monopoly that MITM's a lot of the Internet. But the author provides no evidence of to this claim. My experience has been the opposite: cloudflare interoperated with legacy systems and other cloud providers without locking us in or using anti-competitive tactics. Their presence often improved integration even when other vendors didn’t reciprocate. When people flock to a service because it’s genuinely useful rather than "can't leave Hotel California", that’s not a monopoly — it’s market preference.
That said, there is a real risk if innovation stalls or leadership becomes greedy. Companies that stop innovating sometimes resort to aggressive or extractive practices to stay relevant. It seems to be the trend once companies get too big to die - innovation stalls and their flywheel slows and they become desperate (or greedy) to stay relevant. I would monitor for those signs before I sound any alarm.
Exactly this - CDN is the one thing I don’t use Cloudflare for.
As a web developer, I love how effortless it is to spin up a static site for free using their Pages or Workers features. Sure, I could rent a small server or even host projects on a home setup, but often I just want something simple, fast, and hassle-free - and Cloudflare delivers that at zero cost.
Has this convenience led me to spend money with them? Absolutely. These days I even rely on Cloudflare for DNS management, simply because their interface and overall experience are far better than what I was using before I found them.
That said, I’m not here to defend the company uncritically. I recognize the valid concerns and criticisms that exist. But no platform is without flaws, and in some situations I simply can’t — or don’t want to — prioritize the idealistic view. Sometimes I just want to experiment and build, and Cloudflare makes that easy.
The Internet runs at the will of the government(s). Every government (national, regional, local) has regulations that must be obeyed. Depending upon where you live, some of those regulations may be kept secret from those most affected. An entity like Cloudflare is a juicy target that can be used cooperatively, or abused uncooperatively by those enforcing the regulations.
So Cloudflare has solved one problem (DDoS), while creating several new ones, which most people feel is a fair trade, but it's not a prefect world and there is no perfect solution.
I think it's not just about proving a claim. The same argument that in a democracy, you should build checks and balances to avoid sleepwalking into a dictatorship, is valid for companies, especially internet companies. Look at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and friends. Cloudflare plays nice because it wants to frictionlessly slide into a position where it can extract rent. Today, they are powerful but are not there yet. They're easy to migrate out of because their offerings, amazing as they are, are not irreplaceable so people cannot yet be made hostages. Mostly what happens is your customers feel like CF is holding you for ransom without you knowing it.
When they start charging per packet and making you money, you will become as dependent on them as Apple developers are on Apple, and you'll find out how nice they are.
I have the same fear of tailscale. They are so amazing I just want to move every piece of my infra to them, business and personal, my family's devices, everything. But over time I've gained this instinctive distrust for low friction from startups, especially when the effect (intended or not) is you forgetting how to manage your own tech.
> ... build checks and balances to avoid sleepwalking into a dictatorship.
This resonates well with me. I don't personally know the checks and balances that need to exist so that Cloudflare, or any big influential company, refrains from becoming evil. I find CF relying on open protocols for interoperability with vendors a very positive sign. I don't ever see them (or any company) backtracking of supporting some open standard once they already have support for it. I'm not aware of them having "custom" solutions that also don't have a spec for them. For example, they are absolutely best suited for the pay-per-[ai]crawl business model and if they wanted they could have easily taken advantage of their position. Instead they are relying on open standards and contributing to them. Paint me naive but this gives me a good deal of confidence of the short and medium term.
But I confess that I don't follow the company/market closely enough to know if that is enough or more is needed. More check and balances always seems good but I have no creativity in this regard. Perhaps that was one of my criticisms with the author's post - to collect all the bad press and identify the shortcomings but to stop short of digesting all those findings into a meaningful resolution.
I am using Cloudflare as a back-end and only using workers (can disable all their security, performance, caching, and whatever stuff they offer; which is really just a worker). The product (workers) is differentiated and I don't think there is any company/service out there that is offering an equivalent.
I do not think that's the author complaint, though. I frequently get these cloudflare captachas and it is why I disabled their firewall (it's pure garbage) for my own sites. Cloudflare does not have any monopoly over the services you mentioned (workers, tunnels, images, etc.) but they do have a kind-of-monopoly over DNS/CDN.
> Cloudflare has become a highly attractive target for state-sponsored attacks, suffering from recurring breaches. Their sheer scale, considering that they are serving a substantial portion of the internet, means that an outage or compromise could have widespread, costly consequences.
I'm unsure how much of these can actually be called "attacks" rather than "complying with local laws" that lets them operate in a lot of countries. Including hostile ones.
They really don't segment customer data sufficiently to mittigate this either. CloudFlare even officially says that they don't actually enforce even Regional Services and you have to do that yourself as a customer. Rest of customers get even fewer guarantees than that.
> Regional Services operates on your hostname's IPs. We recommend using DNSSEC and/or DNS over HTTPS to ensure that DNS responses are secure and correct.
This of course is funny considering how CloudFlare has used the same DNSSEC key signing key for ⪆10 years. It also doesn't mention BGP hijacks or similar MITM attacks, because there's also not much anyone besides CloudFlare can do against that.
“complying with local laws” isn’t always a good thing. Here’s some behaviours that you need to report in some countries in order to comply with local laws:
* someone is a homosexual
* someone had sex out of wedlock
* someone is a communist
* someone is right-wing
* someone is a Muslim
* someone is _not_ a Muslim
* someone spoke ill of the current ruler
* someone hosted a messaging service, and didn’t ask users for a copy of their id
Here in the real world companies have 3 choices: (1) comply with local laws, (2) don't operate at all in the country, or (3) operate in the country but ensure they have no staff there and never visit. Anything else is going to involve fines and/or prison for your executives and employees.
I once interviewed at a UK gambling company that was doing option #3, and during the interview it was made clear that I'd never be able to visit the US because they were operating there illegally. (I declined the offer.) Some time later, it was in the news that one of their executives had been arrested and imprisoned in the US when he visited on holiday. (https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/another-uk-bettin...)
In which countries do you have to report someone for any of that? Genuinely curious. Can't think of a single country where any of these criteria would be a reportable offense.
Load of bull.
Every article linked in this is either wrong or mischaracterized.
Cloudflare does not facilitate phising - it just made proxying and tunneling easier.
The breaches and bypasses mentioned are anything but - they are linking to a successful mitigation of an attack as if the attacker got away with something of value.
This entire article reeks of trying to fit the evidence to an agenda.
Considering they couldn't find actual evidence of problems and had to resort to mischaracterization this is actually a great reason to use Cloudflare.
I've reported blatant phishing attacks targeting seniors dozens of times to cloudflare (and so far it's always been cloudflare) and never once have they replied with anything except "we could not determine this was phishi g". They absolutely facilitate phishing through inaction.
Not my experience at all. We've reported hundreds if not thousands of sites and with few exceptions they have taken them down swiftly. Definitely one of the best cloud operators when it comes to this.
I actually looked at all the alternatives listed by the author. Here is the problem: none of them are competitive with Cloudflare. With Cloudflare you don't even need to provide a credit card, just setup with your website and it is "free" for lifetime.
They might pressure you to switch to paid plans if you start getting PBs of traffic, but until that point they will deliver your content for free. It is a huge advantage. Specially when you consider the egress pricing of major cloud providers.
That's like saying your cloud providers are stealing and looking at all your code. Technically you might be right but it is still somewhat disingenuous.
Not to mention all the alternatives are doing MITM anyway. So why single out Cloudflare?
It's pretty disappointing that the author (writing in 2025) says "perhaps to maintain its status as the world’s largest botnet operator," and links to a Spamhaus report from Q1 of 2020.[0]
If you check the most recent version of the report from Spamhaus (Jan to June 2025)[1], Cloudflare is nowhere to be seen, and Digital Ocean, who they recommend as a Cloudflare alternative is listed as third largest botnet host in the world.
Looking back through the historical reports this isn't a new phenomenon, in Q4 of 2022 Digital Ocean was ranked #2 and Cloudflare was down at #17.
Yes, I agree. The anti-monopolistic spirit of the post is good but when you read sentences like that or recommending "major cloud services" as an alternative, well, it starts to smell like a hit piece.
It is sad. The post could be a paragraph of basically ending with negative attributes of oligo and mono polies. Which are what should be evaded.
Other than that, alternatives do not go far as cloudflare does. If you experience a heavy DDOS, either you bankrupt with a large invoice or you suffer heavy outage.
I do not understand why this primary service misses to be listed. Nobody in the planet offers DDOS free, especially to news agencies at their difficult times.
Very good post. Cloudflare is continuously adding services to their cloud offerings (the latest being Email delivery) in a familiar pattern of "let's make it impossible to switch".
- I want to deploy a tiny service for personal use
- That has occasional requests (think ~10 a day)
- Needs to respond to a few daily events: a CRON job here and there, read an email, webhooks... Think a simpler Zapier
In principle this would be perfect for any of the many cloud function providers.
But AFAIK all of them have this vendor lock-in built into their business model and I just refuse to cave in.
Is there anything that I can do to not lock myself into an edge-computing ecosystem (or whatever this is called in the provider of choice) and still get the benefits? Is there any provider that supports any standard that is not tied specifically to their offering?
BunnyCDN's edge functions are more-or-less standard Deno handlers [0], if that can count as "standard". But generally edge functions means the runtime is given by the provider and so we don't really have a standard for that.
You could try to implement your logic in a WASI-compatible web assembly script - then things like I/O etc are abstracted and "standardised" (and then you can write it in whatever language makes you happy, though Rust will be the happy path in terms of ecosystem).
If you're into self-hosting, you can try Coolify - they take care of the Docker stuff and support all kinds services https://coolify.io/docs/services/overview (including plain Docker/compose deployments). So with this you could probably find a way to own it completely.
Some Cloud functions like lambda support OCI container as a runtime target for example.
I understand that feeling but can be hard a provider that fill all that requirements without a expensive cost.
Integrate with the edge computing is part of the price you pay for all the conveniences like automatic builds, Cron and public reachable endpoints (and some of them almost free).
A minimal VPS with linux is always an alternative.
Non-sequitur. Op comment is not criticizing that they offer another product, but that they offer another proprietary product that furthers locks you into their ecosystem.
If it wasn't on HN, being upvoted by some, I wouldn't have clicked on the link judging from the domain name. Turns out it is unicode issues. I wonder if HN will ever fix it.
Readit News
It might sound like I am defending cloudflare, but I am not. I share the author's concern about them becoming a monopoly that MITM's a lot of the Internet. But the author provides no evidence of to this claim. My experience has been the opposite: cloudflare interoperated with legacy systems and other cloud providers without locking us in or using anti-competitive tactics. Their presence often improved integration even when other vendors didn’t reciprocate. When people flock to a service because it’s genuinely useful rather than "can't leave Hotel California", that’s not a monopoly — it’s market preference.
That said, there is a real risk if innovation stalls or leadership becomes greedy. Companies that stop innovating sometimes resort to aggressive or extractive practices to stay relevant. It seems to be the trend once companies get too big to die - innovation stalls and their flywheel slows and they become desperate (or greedy) to stay relevant. I would monitor for those signs before I sound any alarm.
As a web developer, I love how effortless it is to spin up a static site for free using their Pages or Workers features. Sure, I could rent a small server or even host projects on a home setup, but often I just want something simple, fast, and hassle-free - and Cloudflare delivers that at zero cost.
Has this convenience led me to spend money with them? Absolutely. These days I even rely on Cloudflare for DNS management, simply because their interface and overall experience are far better than what I was using before I found them.
That said, I’m not here to defend the company uncritically. I recognize the valid concerns and criticisms that exist. But no platform is without flaws, and in some situations I simply can’t — or don’t want to — prioritize the idealistic view. Sometimes I just want to experiment and build, and Cloudflare makes that easy.
So Cloudflare has solved one problem (DDoS), while creating several new ones, which most people feel is a fair trade, but it's not a prefect world and there is no perfect solution.
Think about the consequences of that. Anyone who connects to your site from China is MITM by Alibaba.
And I would not be surprised if they were abusing their middlebox position to do all kinds of surveillance based on secret "warrants" in other places.
When they start charging per packet and making you money, you will become as dependent on them as Apple developers are on Apple, and you'll find out how nice they are.
I have the same fear of tailscale. They are so amazing I just want to move every piece of my infra to them, business and personal, my family's devices, everything. But over time I've gained this instinctive distrust for low friction from startups, especially when the effect (intended or not) is you forgetting how to manage your own tech.
> ... build checks and balances to avoid sleepwalking into a dictatorship.
This resonates well with me. I don't personally know the checks and balances that need to exist so that Cloudflare, or any big influential company, refrains from becoming evil. I find CF relying on open protocols for interoperability with vendors a very positive sign. I don't ever see them (or any company) backtracking of supporting some open standard once they already have support for it. I'm not aware of them having "custom" solutions that also don't have a spec for them. For example, they are absolutely best suited for the pay-per-[ai]crawl business model and if they wanted they could have easily taken advantage of their position. Instead they are relying on open standards and contributing to them. Paint me naive but this gives me a good deal of confidence of the short and medium term.
But I confess that I don't follow the company/market closely enough to know if that is enough or more is needed. More check and balances always seems good but I have no creativity in this regard. Perhaps that was one of my criticisms with the author's post - to collect all the bad press and identify the shortcomings but to stop short of digesting all those findings into a meaningful resolution.
I do not think that's the author complaint, though. I frequently get these cloudflare captachas and it is why I disabled their firewall (it's pure garbage) for my own sites. Cloudflare does not have any monopoly over the services you mentioned (workers, tunnels, images, etc.) but they do have a kind-of-monopoly over DNS/CDN.
I'm unsure how much of these can actually be called "attacks" rather than "complying with local laws" that lets them operate in a lot of countries. Including hostile ones.
They really don't segment customer data sufficiently to mittigate this either. CloudFlare even officially says that they don't actually enforce even Regional Services and you have to do that yourself as a customer. Rest of customers get even fewer guarantees than that.
Have fun, three-letter agencies.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/limitati...
> Regional Services operates on your hostname's IPs. We recommend using DNSSEC and/or DNS over HTTPS to ensure that DNS responses are secure and correct.
This of course is funny considering how CloudFlare has used the same DNSSEC key signing key for ⪆10 years. It also doesn't mention BGP hijacks or similar MITM attacks, because there's also not much anyone besides CloudFlare can do against that.
* someone is a homosexual * someone had sex out of wedlock * someone is a communist * someone is right-wing * someone is a Muslim * someone is _not_ a Muslim * someone spoke ill of the current ruler * someone hosted a messaging service, and didn’t ask users for a copy of their id
I once interviewed at a UK gambling company that was doing option #3, and during the interview it was made clear that I'd never be able to visit the US because they were operating there illegally. (I declined the offer.) Some time later, it was in the news that one of their executives had been arrested and imprisoned in the US when he visited on holiday. (https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/another-uk-bettin...)
Cloudflare does not facilitate phising - it just made proxying and tunneling easier.
The breaches and bypasses mentioned are anything but - they are linking to a successful mitigation of an attack as if the attacker got away with something of value.
This entire article reeks of trying to fit the evidence to an agenda.
Considering they couldn't find actual evidence of problems and had to resort to mischaracterization this is actually a great reason to use Cloudflare.
They might pressure you to switch to paid plans if you start getting PBs of traffic, but until that point they will deliver your content for free. It is a huge advantage. Specially when you consider the egress pricing of major cloud providers.
Not to mention all the alternatives are doing MITM anyway. So why single out Cloudflare?
If you check the most recent version of the report from Spamhaus (Jan to June 2025)[1], Cloudflare is nowhere to be seen, and Digital Ocean, who they recommend as a Cloudflare alternative is listed as third largest botnet host in the world.
Looking back through the historical reports this isn't a new phenomenon, in Q4 of 2022 Digital Ocean was ranked #2 and Cloudflare was down at #17.
[0]https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/botnet-c-c/botnet-thre...
[1]https://www.spamhaus.org/resource-hub/botnet-c-c/botnet-thre...
Other than that, alternatives do not go far as cloudflare does. If you experience a heavy DDOS, either you bankrupt with a large invoice or you suffer heavy outage.
I do not understand why this primary service misses to be listed. Nobody in the planet offers DDOS free, especially to news agencies at their difficult times.
If the all the ISPs can get the their networking knowledge up-to-date I can remove it.
I have set the protection level to the lowest setting to not trigger unnecessary capatchs.
Depending on what country you're in and what your traffic patterns look like, it might be higher. Some countries are >70% IPv6 traffic to Google.
Do you ever check your access logs to see when you're ready to go IPv6 only?
- I want to deploy a tiny service for personal use
- That has occasional requests (think ~10 a day)
- Needs to respond to a few daily events: a CRON job here and there, read an email, webhooks... Think a simpler Zapier
In principle this would be perfect for any of the many cloud function providers.
But AFAIK all of them have this vendor lock-in built into their business model and I just refuse to cave in.
Is there anything that I can do to not lock myself into an edge-computing ecosystem (or whatever this is called in the provider of choice) and still get the benefits? Is there any provider that supports any standard that is not tied specifically to their offering?
You could try to implement your logic in a WASI-compatible web assembly script - then things like I/O etc are abstracted and "standardised" (and then you can write it in whatever language makes you happy, though Rust will be the happy path in terms of ecosystem).
If you're into self-hosting, you can try Coolify - they take care of the Docker stuff and support all kinds services https://coolify.io/docs/services/overview (including plain Docker/compose deployments). So with this you could probably find a way to own it completely.
[0] https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/
I understand that feeling but can be hard a provider that fill all that requirements without a expensive cost.
Integrate with the edge computing is part of the price you pay for all the conveniences like automatic builds, Cron and public reachable endpoints (and some of them almost free).
A minimal VPS with linux is always an alternative.
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A trash website that I like a lot, but still a trash website.
Maybe in 20 years we’ll be able to use emojis on here.
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