Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous Free tier?

This site is hosted with Cloudflare Pages and I'm really happy with it. When I explored how to create a site like mine in 2025, I wondered why there's an abundance of good, free hosting these days. Years ago, you'd have to pay for hosting, but now there's tons of sites with generous free tiers like GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Netlify, etc.

There are various types of usage limits across the platforms, but the biggest one to worry about is bandwidth. Nothing can make your heartrate faster than realizing your site is going viral and you either have to foot the bill or your site gets hugged to death. I gathered some limits from various services here.

The platforms generally say your site shouldn't be more than ~1GB in size and less than some tens of thousands of files. This site in its nascency is about 15MB and <150 files. I don't plan to start posting RAW photo galleries, so if I start hitting those limits, please be concerned for my health and safety.

So why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?

Why indeed. Strategically, Cloudflare offering unlimited bandwidth for small static sites like mine fits in with its other benevolent services like 1.1.1.1 (that domain lol) and free DDOS protection.

Cloudflare made a decision early in our history that we wanted to make security tools as widely available as possible. This meant that we provided many tools for free, or at minimal cost, to best limit the impact and effectiveness of a wide range of cyberattacks.

- Matthew Prince, Cloudflare Co-Founder and CEO

But I want to think of more practical reasons. First, a static website is so lightweight and easy to serve up that it's barely a blip on the radar. For example, the page you're reading now is ~2.2MB, which is in line with typical page weights of ~2.7MB these days. With Cloudflare's ubiquitous network, caching, and optimization, that's a small lift. My site ain't exactly Netflix.

Second, companies like Cloudflare benefit from a fast, secure internet. If the internet is fast and reliable, more people will want to use it. The more people that want to use it, the more companies that offer their services on the internet. The more companies that offer services on the internet, the more likely they'll need to buy security products. Oh look, Cloudflare happens to have a suite of security products for sale! They flywheel spins...

Third, now that I’m familiar with Cloudflare’s slick UI, I’m going to think favorably about it in the future if my boss ever asks me about their products. I took zero risk trying it out, and now that I have a favorable impression, I'm basically contributing to grassroots word-of-mouth marketing with this very article. Additionally, there's plenty of "Upgrade to Pro" buttons sprinkled about. It's the freemium model at work.

What does Cloudflare say?

Now that I have my practical reasons, I'm curious what Cloudflare officially says. I couldn't find anything specifically in the Cloudflare Pages docs, or anywhere else! Neither the beta announcement or the GA announcement have the word "bandwidth" on the page.

Update: shubhamjain on HN found a great quote from Matt Prince that explains it's about data and scale. And xd1936 helpfully found the official comment that evaded my googling.

I don't know anybody important enough to get me an official comment, so I suppose I just have to rely on my intuition. Fortunately, I don't have all my eggs in one basket, since my site is partially hosted on GitHub. Thanks to that diversification, if Cloudflare decides to change their mind someday, I've got options!