Seems like inflation is everywhere these days!  Big hosting companies have broken the $5 mark, everything from gasoline to streaming is more expensive, and now Cloudflare has announced a 25% price increase:

Cloudflare is raising prices for the first time in the last 12 years. Beginning January 15, 2023, new sign-ups will be charged $25 per month for our Pro Plan (up from $20 per month) and $250 per month for our Business Plan (up from $200 per month). Any paying customers who sign up before January 15, 2023, including any currently paying customers who signed up at any point over the last 12 years, will stay at the old monthly price until May 14, 2023.

The announcement follows what has become the standard corporate playbook this year.  You might find a translation helpful.

CorporateSpeak

“We’ve been in business _____ years and have never raised prices before!”

Translation: We didn’t care about profits before because we had all that investor money.  Also, we haven’t raised prices because we haven’t been around very long.

“Wow, look at how much we’ve grown in that time!”

Translation: Like all businesses, we have to compete.  Every other company on the planet has grown and changed in the last ___ years and we are no different.

“We have a free tier!”

Translation: By raising prices, we widen the gulf between free and paid.  We’re also putting our features into paid, which makes free more and more impoverished.  In the long run, this means fewer people will convert, and that makes our free tier kind of a hassle for us, and we’ll probably discontinue it at some point.  But at the moment, look, we have a free tier!

“We are innovating with sustainable synergies and evolving transdimensional cross-domain breakthrough advanced technologies!”

Or as Cloudflare puts it,

• “orders of magnitude more valuable across every dimension — performance, reliability, and security”
• “our continued success should be primarily driven by new innovation”
• “enable us to further accelerate our network expansion and pace of innovation “

In other words, like every other business you have to compete.

It’s All Double Talk

There’s a phenomenon in business that goes like this:

• Business wants to communicate news
• To get the best spin, they drown it in adjectives and superlatives and hand-waving
• Consumers aren’t idiots and see through that, parsing the announcement to strip out all the nonsense to get to the part they’re interested in.  “Oh, my bill’s going up” is all they care about.

It’s a tedious, silly exercise but one businesses seem addicted to.  We get it – you’re raising prices.  Why can’t you just say that without reams about innovation, excellence, and the bright shining future?  The effort to generate these press releases and the the effort by the reader to skip all the nonsense and get to the facts is all wasted time.

TL;DR: Cloudflare wants more money.

See how easy it is?

• Author
• Recent Posts

raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

Latest posts by raindog308 (see all)

• COMMUNITY NEWS: RackNerd LLC, Global IaaS Provider, Expands European Footprint with New Dublin, Ireland Datacenter - November 16, 2024
• Hey Providers – Want Some FREE Advertising During the SuperBowl? - November 14, 2024
• Inception Hosting is Closing Its Doors - November 12, 2024