Free CDN tiers are genuinely useful and genuinely not free. You pay in different currency: limits, support queues and the absence of anyone contractually obliged to care when things break.
What free is for
Side projects, low-stakes sites and early experiments are exactly what free tiers exist to serve, and they serve them well. If an hour of downtime costs you nothing measurable, a free plan is the correct engineering decision and you should feel no premium-plan guilt. The trade is honest on the provider’s side too: free tiers are marketing that pays for itself in upgrades, and everyone in the transaction understands the arrangement.
Where the bill arrives
The costs appear as ceilings: fair-use policies with undisclosed thresholds, security features held back for paid plans, support that is a community forum, and no SLA to point at during an incident. Businesses discover these terms at the worst possible moment, mid-outage, mid-launch or mid-attack. The subtler cost is optionality. Free plans rarely expose the configuration depth, cache controls and analytics that let you diagnose problems, so difficulties that would be an afternoon on a paid plan become archaeology.
The most expensive free-tier moment we see repeatedly is the traffic spike that succeeds. A campaign lands, traffic multiplies, and the fair-use ceiling you never tested becomes a throttle or a surprise upgrade conversation at the exact hour your site is winning. Paid entry tiers invert that moment: the spike bills at a known rate you already accepted, and the campaign’s success stays a success. Predictability under good news is the underrated half of what a contract buys; everyone models the bad-day scenario and almost nobody models the good one.
The graduation question
The moment traffic carries revenue, run the numbers on a committed plan. Entry commitments start lower than most teams expect, ours begin at $49 a month, and the delta buys contractual uptime, real support and security that is tuned rather than toggled. The graduation math is friendlier than teams expect precisely because entry commitments have fallen: the gap between free and contractual is now measured in tens of dollars monthly, not thousands.
In practice
A simple test settles most cases: write down what one hour of full downtime during your busiest week would cost in revenue and reputation. If the number is effectively zero, stay free with a clear conscience. If you had to think about it, the answer is already yes, and the only remaining question is sizing the entry tier.
Unsure which side of the line you are on? The assessment answers it honestly, including when free is genuinely the right call.