Traffic is cheap and has been for years. Providers do not pay for the amount of sent/received data but rather a fixed price for capacity at peak and this fee can easily be absorbed into the price of their service (they also don't pay any fees if they are peering with the destination directly). This is why many companies (even smaller ones) are able to provide unlimited traffic for free or free but limited to tens of terabytes (OVHcloud, Scaleway, netcup, Hetzner...).
How much would it cost to have unlimited 1 Gbps in a collocated server? A local datacenter I'm familiar with offers 2U with unlimited 1 Gbps for ~$60. Each additional 1 Gbps costs ~$20 up to 10 Gbps. The larger plans come with 10 Gbps by default (https://dc6.cz/cenik-server-housingu/). If these are the prices offered to end customers from a company, how little do the large players pay?
Cloudflare is able to provide free egress because they are not (as?) greedy. The biggest scam the cloud industry has been able to pull off is to convince people that paying for traffic in 2024 is normal and expected.
Traffic is cheap and has been for years. Providers do not pay for the amount of sent/received data but rather a fixed price for capacity at peak and this fee can easily be absorbed into the price of their service (they also don't pay any fees if they are peering with the destination directly). This is why many companies (even smaller ones) are able to provide unlimited traffic for free or free but limited to tens of terabytes (OVHcloud, Scaleway, netcup, Hetzner...).
How much would it cost to have unlimited 1 Gbps in a collocated server? A local datacenter I'm familiar with offers 2U with unlimited 1 Gbps for ~$60. Each additional 1 Gbps costs ~$20 up to 10 Gbps. The larger plans come with 10 Gbps by default (https://dc6.cz/cenik-server-housingu/). If these are the prices offered to end customers from a company, how little do the large players pay?
Cloudflare is able to provide free egress because they are not (as?) greedy. The biggest scam the cloud industry has been able to pull off is to convince people that paying for traffic in 2024 is normal and expected.