Reaffirming our commitment to free

What this post added

This post reaffirms Cloudflare's foundational commitment to its free tier, launched 14 years ago alongside the company. It details how the free service is not only mission-aligned but also business-aligned, contributing to lower costs through strategic peering with ISPs and utilizing off-cycle network capacity. The post highlights how free customers provide invaluable threat intelligence and act as a large-scale QA mechanism, driving product iteration and the development of more intuitive tools. Furthermore, it announces 16 product updates that enhance the free plan, including AI model auditing, improved Turnstile accuracy, expanded access to Zero Trust tools (CASB, DLP, DEX, MNM), new security features like Leaked Credential Checks and Page Shield Script Monitor, API Shield Schema Validation, enhanced analytics, Sign in with Google, autogenerated API SDKs for Terraform, managed TURN service for Cloudflare Calls, Zstandard compression, Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), improved Worker logging, free Service Bindings and Tail Workers, Image Optimization, and faster free domains with Speed Brain. This post solidifies the free tier as a core component of Cloudflare's growth and product evolution.