My perspective looking at them and other options for a bandwidth-heavy, largely non-HTML load a couple years ago:

1) All but the top self-serve plan ($200 at the time) wasn't worth anything for a business past the "finding a market" stage. No SLA at all under that level (at least, at the time)

2) The $200 plan, though, is actually a hell of a bargain. You get a lot for it. If your load is almost all HTML/CSS/JS and some light-ish worker use. And (allegedly, see #5) your bandwidth use isn't crazy high.

3) They basically don't care about serving any need between the top self-serve plan and a ~$5,000-to-start Enterprise plan. If you don't fit in the top self-serve but are under that level...

4) Surprisingly, given their reputation at the lower levels of service, in the Enterprise tier, they weren't competitive on bandwidth. If the main thing you need to do is sling bits, you can do that quite a bit cheaper elsewhere. Overall, they seem to want customers who need lots of their services, not just any one component. If you don't need their various corporate VPN type products and a bunch of other stuff, they're a bad fit.

5) We were told by a competitor that OP's experience is common and is often perceived by customers (their perception, mind you) as a bait and switch (see also: that huge gap between self-service and enterprise, in which they offer no options). Now, the competitor has some self-interest there, but even the non-sales guys on the call instantly kinda smirked and shook their heads when I mentioned CloudFlare.

6) We were told incorrect things by CloudFlare's sales folks. If we'd followed their advice, we might be OP.

It seems like the $200/mo plan and below are subsidized by their marketing budget, and the various ToS terms are there to give them discretion over whether those users are worth it or not: either low-cost users who are using too many resources, or users who they think they can charge more.

I investigated Cloudflare and the $200/mo plan seemed to good to be true so I contacted sales who verified that yes, it was too good to be true and my usage of the $200/mo plan would violate their ToS. They initially quoted $5k/mo over the phone, and then came back with a formal quote with a number much higher than that.

My take is that Cloudflare's product is so good that they can get away with any kind of sales practices they want. It's like shooting fish in a barrel: just analyze customers on the $200/mo tier and find the ones that look like they could spend way more. It's not even wrong in concept: sales upselling is SOP, and the low-cost tiers provide a lot of value to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they're offering. But the combination of the two sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

AWS doesn't have transparent pricing either, but in a different way. Yes, you can use more and more bandwidth and know exactly what you'll get charged, but once you get to Cloudflare Enterprise levels of bandwidth the AWS sticker prices would be astronomical and everyone negotiates non-transparent lower rates.

This is the big issue. There is always tension in these “free” setups.

I get more worried when the giveaways / marketing is VC funded - they often end at some point or pressure inside to dial back etc.

“We have free egress to Oceania!” - no, you don’t. You are subsidizing that.

Given what aws charges and how they charge for almost everything- no reason to be any pressure to move me to another plan. AWS free tiers are relatively minuscule

fly.io is pretty expensive compared to wholesale bandwidth rates. Especially for Europe.

Their bandwidth pricing is competing with AWS, not wholesale bandwidth rates.