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Is Cloudflare overcharging us for their images service?

y went down a very deep rabbit hole to understand why, some months, Cloudflare was charging us 3x what we were expecting for their Cloudflare Images service. I’m posting this write-up because back then, a quick search didn’t turn anything up; and Cloudflare support has totally ghosted us for more than 8 months now.

To make sense of it, we ended up painstakingly entering all the transactions (meaning charges, payments, credits) into a spreadsheet, to try and see which balance actually corresponded to what, and to try to understand if and how we had been overcharged. In our case, however, the current scale of our collection (a few terabytes at the moment, and constantly growing) compared to the very low revenue (a trickle of sales commissions whenever someone ends up buying on eBay a postcard that they found through EphemeraSearch) means that we have to be very efficient with our (personal) funds. We want to clarify that we think that Cloudflare Images is a great service, but that its pricing model (specifically, the prepaid aspect that has to be manually adjusted) is utterly borked.

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