Cloudflare CEO Says Free Services Will Continue as Long as He is in Charge
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince responded on X on October 18, stating, "As long as I’m CEO," indicating that the company will continue to provide free services as long as he remains CEO.
This response addressed user concerns about the sustainability of the free plan; Prince previously explained the rationale for free services in a 2016 Stack Exchange answer, including that free users help identify more types of attacks to improve protection, bring products into companies that become paying customers, serve as potential employees, participate in testing new features, and reduce bandwidth costs through network scale.
Since its establishment in 2010, Cloudflare has offered a free plan covering basic services such as CDN, DDoS protection, and SSL; the company has repeatedly reaffirmed that the free plan will continue, stating it helps lower overall unit costs and expand network effects.
With a high proportion of free users, paying customers make up only a small percentage of the total; the company maintains profitability through scale effects and conversion of paid features, and has again confirmed its commitment to the free plan for 2024.
Prince's recent response continues the public stance from 2016, without setting a specific time limit, but linking it to his tenure.
The company’s network covers many cities and countries globally, handling a large volume of internet traffic, with the free tier seen as a core strategy for acquiring data and building a user base.
Market mechanism: The free tier lowers costs and supports paid business through user-contributed attack data, referrals, and scale effects, with funds and usage flowing from individuals and small sites to the platform, benefiting Cloudflare, which has access to large-scale network and security data, while competitors that cannot offer similar free basic services face pressure.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Matthew Prince detailed five business reasons for free services in 2016 on Stack Exchange, including broader attack data, customer referrals, recruitment sources, feature testing, and bandwidth economies of scale; in October 2026, he responded to sustainability questions on X with "as long as I’m CEO," continuing the same logic.
In terms of capital pathways, the free plan serves as a customer acquisition and data collection channel, converting individual developers and small sites into potential paying customers or internal referrers, while reducing unit bandwidth costs through scale; the motivation is to leverage network effects to make free users themselves a support for the business, rather than purely a cost center.
This is analogous to other infrastructure companies that acquire scale through free or low-cost basic services and then upsell; currently, Cloudflare is in a phase of treating the free tier as a long-term strategy rather than a short-term promotion, running parallel to new businesses like AI crawler subscriptions.
Structurally, this combines pricing power and network effects: by offering basic security and performance services for free, it acquires data and traffic, with the mechanism being that scale reduces marginal costs, while the diverse attack samples provided by free users enhance overall protection capabilities, giving the platform a sustained advantage in security and distribution.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- The work done by free users is sometimes more valuable than that of paying users.
- Scale itself can lower unit costs.
- Personal commitments are harder to retract than company policies.