I’m using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I’m using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?
This is basically “the first hit is free”
It costs cloudflare basically nothing to host free customers ( if you start to push real traffic you will get an instant call from sales). By being a free customer you are basically a guinea pig for all new features as they are rolled out globally.
How much traffic before the sales team comes knocking?
I am no expert, so grains of salt and such. But my assumption is that it’s a marketing expense. They get a lot of people familiar with cloud flare services and some of them later need a professional level solution. So people use what they are already familiar with. This is the same reason why tech companies provide hardware/software to schools for cheap/free.
Developers, like me, use the free tier for staging and testing and then when the project is deployed to production, I setup a paid account for the client.
I also use their domain registrar and sometimes buy CDN bandwidth in complex setups.
In what way am I the product when using CloudFlare’s free tier?
I realize the name of the game is to protect as much of your data as possible, however, unless you have your own ISP/backbone, you are, at some point, the product. I utilize the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust. For last month, I used 375.28 GiB. I don’t run the 'arr stack tho. I do, however, stream my own audio collection via Navidrome. I have had zero issues with the evil Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, except for a brief pause while Cloudflare had some issues last month. Other than that, smooth sailing. I also have tailscale as an overlay on the server and on the stand alone pfsense firewall, which has a very robust set of rules and heavy filtering going on.
Is there another way
There are always other ways. Pangolin, et al. It just depends on you, and what you want to put in to get out of it all. If you are going this route, investigate a WAF like Crowdsec, or similar, and you might want to look at pfsense or opnsense.
You’re using a service that is proxying your data. They can read all of it.
If you don’t care, then good for you. You’re still the product as being a user because whatever you happen to be serving may eventually become interesting to them.
If not, no harm done. It costs pennies to host a 24/7 load balanced reverse proxy. You just can’t do it yourself.
An alternative would be to install Pangolin on a small v-server
