EastDakota

I promise it's still something we're working on. A complete rework of billing is scheduled for Q3. That will include PayPal (and Bitcoin).

At a high level: People hate their cell phone providers because their bills are unpredictable. We don't want to be thought of like a cell phone provider.

The scale economics in our business are significant. Our primary variable cost is bandwidth. However, the rate at which bandwidth prices drop is very fast as you start to get to scale. We're now at the scale where we can peer off a significant portion of our traffic, making it effectively free to us. If we can continue to push bandwidth toward zero then it makes sense for us to not charge customers more based on that.

The other thing is that we get smarter about stopping threats with every request that routes through our network. If we charged for bandwidth then it would cause customers to potentially avoid routing traffic through us. That goes against the core value that we provide: effectively a neighborhood watch for the Internet.

I'm excited about our plan to enable SSL even for free customers. The amount of bizdev, systems, and dev ops work necessary to make that happen is staggering. We've literally been working on it for the last two years and the pieces are finally coming together. I'm excited about it because I think we'll double the number of sites protected by HTTPS web-wide the day we turn it on. That's pretty cool.

:-)

One of the things that is critical to get mass adoption of CloudFlare in highly secure environments like financial institutions is a way to handle SSL without us ever having to be trusted with our customers' SSL keys. We've built something that does that and it's now running on a handful of customers' sites as well as on portions of cloudflare.com (the blog included). That's all I can say for now, but it's pretty cool and we'll be talking about it a lot more in the next few months.

We're watching the FCC's moves on Network Neutrality very closely. My cofounder Michelle (@zatlyn) sits on the Open Internet Advisory Committee for the FCC. CloudFlare is the only startup represented on the committee. We recently retained a DC lobbying firm in part to advocate for network neutrality and we hired our first in-house counsel out of Google and the FCC. This is an important issue for us.

It's hard to overstate the benefits an uncensored, open Internet has created for the world. We're strong proponents of preserving the principles of Network Neutrality that have allowed open innovation. If governments around the world start to chip away at those principles, I'm hopeful that CloudFlare can use our scale and size in the market in order to ensure our customers will still be as fast as possible around the world.