By Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank
There is a truth that most technology vendors either do not understand or choose to ignore: the best sales pitch you will ever make is letting someone use your product for free. Not a watered-down demo, not a 14-day trial that expires before anyone has figured out the interface, but a genuinely generous free tier that lets people build real things and solve real problems. Cloudflare understands this better than almost anyone in the industry right now, and it has made me a genuine advocate in a way that no amount of marketing spend ever could.
1. How I Found Cloudflare and Almost Lost It
My journey with Cloudflare did not begin with enthusiasm. I came to it as someone running a personal blog at andrewbaker.ninja, not as a CIO evaluating enterprise security platforms. My initial awareness of what genuinely differentiated Cloudflare from other CDN and security platforms was low, and early on there were real friction points. The lack of private peering between Cloudflare and AWS in South Africa was a meaningful concern. For anyone thinking about infrastructure in the South African market, network latency and data sovereignty matter enormously, and the absence of a direct peering arrangement had me questioning whether Cloudflare was the right long-term choice even for a personal site.
Then came a series of outages in 2025. Any one of those incidents in isolation might have been forgivable, but cumulatively they put Cloudflare in a difficult position. For a platform whose core value proposition is reliability and availability, sustained turbulence shakes confidence.
Here is the thing though: I stayed. I worked through those issues rather than walking away. And the reason I stayed was not because of a reassuring account manager call or a compelling analyst report. It was because the free tier had given me genuine, hands-on depth of knowledge about the platform. When things wobbled, I understood the architecture well enough to diagnose, to find workarounds, and to make an informed judgment about whether the underlying platform was structurally sound despite the turbulence. That knowledge did not come from a sales deck. It came from building with the product.
What Cloudflare did not know when they gave a free service to a small personal blog was that the person running that blog would go on to become the CIO of Capitec Bank, one of South Africa’s largest retail banks with millions of active customers. The product knowledge they embedded in me through a free tier intended for the smallest possible use case became directly relevant when evaluating whether Cloudflare’s architecture, differentiation, and reliability were credible at institutional scale. That is the leverage hidden inside every free tier account. You genuinely have no idea who is on the other end of it.
2. What Cloudflare Actually Gives You for Free
The Cloudflare free tier is, frankly, extraordinary. When I first started using it for my personal blog, I expected the usual pattern: enough capability to see the shape of the product, but with enough gates and limits to push you toward a paid plan. What I found instead was a comprehensive platform that covers almost every dimension of modern web security and performance at zero cost.
2.1 Security and Performance at the Edge
The foundation of the free tier is unmetered DDoS mitigation. Not capped, not throttled after a threshold, unmetered. For a personal blog or small business site, volumetric attacks are existential threats, and the fact that Cloudflare absorbs them at no cost is a remarkable statement of confidence in their own network scale. Sitting on top of that is a global CDN spanning over 300 cities, with free tier users on the same edge infrastructure as enterprise customers. SSL is automated, free, and renews without any manual intervention, making the secure default the effortless default. Five managed WAF rules covering the most critical OWASP categories are included, along with basic bot protection that handles the constant noise floor of scrapers, credential stuffers, and scanning bots that any public site attracts.
Caching deserves particular attention because for anyone running on a low end AWS instance type, and most personal blogs do exactly that, it is not a nice to have. It is life or death for the origin server. A t3.micro or t4g.small running WordPress has a hard ceiling. Under normal traffic patterns it holds up, but a post shared on LinkedIn with any momentum or picked up by a newsletter will send concurrent requests that a small instance simply cannot absorb. With Cloudflare caching absorbing the majority of that traffic, the origin barely notices the spike. I have watched this play out against andrewbaker.ninja more than once. The cache hit ratio in the analytics dashboard tells the story clearly: the origin handles a fraction of total requests while Cloudflare absorbs the rest. That is an availability and cost story simultaneously. Cache rules, custom TTLs, per-URL purging, and intelligent handling of query strings and cookies are all available on the free tier, giving you a degree of control that is not normally associated with a free offering.
2.2 Developer Capability and Operational Visibility
Beyond security and performance, the free tier extends into territory that genuinely surprises. Workers gives you serverless compute at the edge with 100,000 requests per day included, which is more than enough to build meaningful functionality: request transformation, custom authentication flows, A/B testing, and API proxying. Cloudflare Pages adds free static site hosting with unlimited bandwidth and up to 500 builds per month, competitive with the best JAMstack platforms. DNS management sits on infrastructure widely regarded as the fastest authoritative DNS in the world, with DNSSEC and a clean management interface included at no cost.
The analytics layer is where Cloudflare makes a particularly interesting choice. Rather than gating visibility behind paid plans to obscure the value being delivered, the free tier shows you everything: requests, bandwidth, cache hit ratios, threats blocked by type, geographic traffic distribution, and real user Web Vitals data including Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift from actual visitor sessions. For andrewbaker.ninja, the geographic breakdown alone was genuinely new information that shaped content decisions. Seeing threats blocked in real time makes the protection layer concrete rather than theoretical. Zero Trust Access rounds out the free offering with up to 50 users, giving hands-on experience with a ZTNA model that enterprise vendors charge significant per-user premiums to access.
One area where I would encourage Cloudflare to go further is 404 error tracking, which currently sits behind paid plans. A limited version tracking errors for just a handful of pages would cost them very little while giving free tier users a direct experience of the capability. The broader principle I would advocate is that every service in the Cloudflare catalogue should have at least a small free window. Exposure drives understanding, understanding drives advocacy, and advocacy drives enterprise pipeline far more reliably than any campaign.
3. The Strategic Value of Free Tier as a Leadership Development Tool
Let me be direct about what actually happened here. Cloudflare gave a free service to a personal blog with negligible traffic. In doing so, they educated a future CIO. That CIO later sat in a position where Cloudflare’s suitability for one of South Africa’s largest retail banks was a legitimate question worth asking. The product knowledge embedded through a free tier account for andrewbaker.ninja directly shaped how that evaluation was framed, what questions were asked, and what confidence existed in the platform’s architectural differentiation when the stability questions of 2025 were at their most acute.
No sales team call produced that outcome. No analyst briefing, no conference sponsorship, no whitepaper. A free tier account for a small personal blog did.
This is not a coincidence or a lucky edge case. It is the mechanism by which free tier compounds in value over time in ways that are almost impossible to model but entirely real. The person experimenting with your product on a side project today is accumulating product knowledge that travels with them as their career develops. When they move into senior leadership, that knowledge does not reset. It informs how they frame requirements, how they assess vendor claims, and crucially how much resilience they have when a platform goes through a difficult period.
When I encountered challenges with Cloudflare in 2025, my response was shaped entirely by the depth of understanding I had developed through free tier usage on a personal site. I knew enough about how the network operated, where the architectural constraints lay, and what the realistic recovery trajectory looked like to make a considered judgment rather than a reactive one. That knowledge is also what I draw on when evaluating Cloudflare capabilities at institutional scale. I am not reading vendor documentation in isolation. I have built things with the product. I have watched things fail. I have seen what recovery looks like. That is a categorically different foundation for decision making, and it originated from a free account protecting a personal blog.
The same pattern holds with AWS. My understanding of AWS architecture began with free tier experimentation long before I was evaluating AWS as a strategic platform for a major bank. The 12 months of free tier access that AWS provides across a substantial catalogue of services is one of the smartest investments they have made in their developer ecosystem. My seven AWS certifications represent formal validation of knowledge that was built largely through hands-on experimentation the free tier enabled. When I evaluate AWS proposals at Capitec or advocate for specific AWS architectural patterns, that credibility traces back to free tier experience. No marketing budget produces that outcome.
Free tier products are, in effect, a leadership development programme that technology vendors run at their own expense. Every future CIO, CTO, or technology decision maker working their way up through an organisation is building instincts and preferences right now through the products they can access and experiment with freely. The vendors who understand this invest in those experiences. The vendors who do not are optimising for short-term revenue extraction at the cost of long-term pipeline development.
4. The Slack Cautionary Tale
Slack represents the opposite lesson, and it is worth examining honestly.
I used Slack’s free tier heavily for years. Across multiple communities, interest groups, and peer networks, Slack was the default platform precisely because the free tier was generous enough to make it viable for groups that could not or would not pay. It was through this extensive free tier use that I developed deep familiarity with the product, its integrations, its workflow automation capabilities, and its organisational model. That familiarity translated directly into Slack advocacy in enterprise contexts.
Then came a series of changes to the free tier. Message history limits became more restrictive. Integration constraints tightened. The experience of being a free tier user shifted from feeling like a valued participant in the platform ecosystem to feeling like someone being actively nudged toward payment.
The result was not that the communities I participated in upgraded to paid Slack. The result was that those communities moved to other platforms. Discord absorbed many of them. Some moved to Microsoft Teams. Others fragmented across different tools. In most cases the community did not reconstitute on Slack at a paid tier. It simply left.
The downstream consequence for Salesforce, which acquired Slack for approximately 27.7 billion dollars, is a meaningful erosion of exactly the pipeline that free tier usage was building. Every community organiser, technology professional, and business leader who built their Slack intuitions through free tier usage and then migrated to an alternative platform is now building comparable depth of knowledge on a competing product. The future enterprise purchasing decisions of those individuals will reflect that. Slack did not just lose free tier users. It cut off future sales pipeline development at the roots.
This is a cautionary tale that should sit prominently in the strategic planning conversations of any technology company considering changes to their free tier offering. The immediate revenue signal from restricting free tier is misleading. The long-term signal, which is harder to measure and slower to manifest, is the erosion of informed advocacy and the diversion of future decision makers toward alternatives.
5. The Legacy Pricing Trap
There is a category of enterprise technology vendor whose approach to pricing is so fundamentally at odds with how purchasing decisions actually get made that it borders on self-defeating. I will not name them directly. They tend to employ a lot of lawyers, and this blog has enough going on already without that particular excitement.
You know who they are though. Their pricing model is built on tiers, each one separated from the next by a gap that costs companies millions of dollars to cross. The product catalogue is divided up such that anything genuinely interesting sits in a tier that requires a significant commercial commitment before you can touch it. You cannot experiment with it. You cannot build intuition about it. You cannot develop the informed advocacy that would eventually lead your organisation to invest in it properly. The gate comes before the experience, and the gate is expensive.
This is anti-sales dressed up as a pricing strategy.
6. The Bundle Illusion
6.1 The Christmas Hamper Problem
Buying enterprise software is nothing like buying a Christmas hamper. With a hamper you are happy saying you are buying “stuff”. You do not need to know what is in it or whether you will use every item. Enterprise technology does not work like that. You cannot tell your board you are buying “stuff” from vendor X, and you cannot tell your CISO that the solution to your identity management problem is definitely somewhere in the tier you just committed millions to. Every product needs to be evaluated, understood, and justified against a specific problem.
Yet the hamper model is precisely what tiered pricing enforces. Inside the bundle are products you actively use, products you decided were not fit for purpose, products you never knew existed until after signing, and products duplicated by something you already own. The vendor’s position is that the bundle is worth the price regardless of how much you consume. They are so magnificent, apparently, that clients should simply pay for the option to use the software.
6.2 The Duplicate Purchase Problem
I have watched this play out repeatedly. Organisations on a pricing tier that included a fully capable security product, who had gone out and bought the same capability from a competitor anyway, because nobody knew the bundled product was there, or had no basis for trusting it when a real problem arrived. The free tier philosophy exists precisely to prevent this. If engineers can experience a product before a commercial commitment is made, they build the knowledge and trust that makes the bundled product the obvious choice rather than the invisible one.
6.3 The Tier Reclassification Trap
It gets worse. These same vendors have a habit of quietly moving products that sit in your current tier up into a higher tier at contract renewal. The feature set you budgeted for and built processes around is now in the next tier up, and the message is clear: pay more or lose capability. The commercial logic from the vendor’s side is understandable in the narrow short-term sense. The strategic damage is severe and largely invisible until it is too late to reverse.
The practical consequence is that customers become genuinely reluctant to adopt new products within their current tier, even when those products are included and theoretically free to use. The rational response to a vendor that periodically reclassifies features upward is to avoid becoming dependent on anything you are not paying explicitly to retain. So the products sit unused. The integration work does not happen. The institutional knowledge does not develop. And the vendor wonders why adoption of their broader portfolio is lower than the addressable opportunity suggests it should be.
6.4 The Refresh Con
The vendor’s response to low adoption of bundled products is not to ask why included products go unused or what that says about product accessibility. It is to restructure the bundle, move items between tiers, throw out the tins of expired spam, and keep the price the same.
The hamper is still worth the same, apparently.
6.5 A Generational Reckoning
The generational problem this creates is profound and slow-moving enough that most of these vendors will not feel it until it is structurally very difficult to address. The technology leaders who bought into these platforms did so in an era where the vendor had sufficient market leverage to make the tier-based model stick. Those leaders are gradually retiring. The generation replacing them grew up with AWS free tier, with Cloudflare free tier, with open source everything, with the expectation that you experience a product before you commit to it. They have spent their formative professional years building instincts on platforms that trusted them with real capability before asking for money.
When those leaders sit across a procurement table from a vendor whose pitch begins with a multi-million dollar tier commitment required just to evaluate the relevant product set, the cultural mismatch is immediate and significant. It is not just a price objection. It is a philosophical incompatibility with how they believe technology decisions should be made. And unlike the previous generation of buyers who perhaps had fewer alternatives, this generation has grown up with genuinely competitive options that do not impose the same barriers.
The vendors who have built their commercial model on tier-based access restrictions have a window to adapt. That window is not permanent. Every year that passes without meaningful change to how they allow potential customers to experience their products is another cohort of future decision makers building their instincts and loyalties elsewhere.
The root cause of this strategic blindness is that there is no metric for the depth of understanding your product has in the marketplace. You cannot put it in a board report. You cannot trend it quarter on quarter. You cannot attribute it to a campaign or a sales motion. And because it is unmeasurable, short-sighted technology companies convince themselves the gap can be bridged through other means. So they invest in snappy Gartner acronyms that reframe existing capability as visionary innovation, and they deploy fleets of well-heeled sales teams whose job is to manufacture urgency and compress evaluation cycles before the prospect has time to develop genuine product intuition. It works, right up until it does not. The deal closes but the understanding never develops, and without understanding there is no organic advocacy, no internal champion who truly believes in the platform, and no resilience when the product disappoints.
Technology companies run by engineers tend to understand this instinctively. Engineers know what it means to learn by doing. They know the difference between reading documentation and actually building something. They know that genuine conviction about a technology comes from hands-on experience and cannot be manufactured by a sales process however well resourced. When engineers run product strategy, free tier investment makes intuitive sense because they have lived the experience themselves. When the company is run primarily by people whose mental model of selling is about controlling access and extracting maximum value at each gate, the free tier looks like revenue left on the table rather than pipeline being built. That framing error is expensive, and it compounds over time in ways that do not show up in any dashboard until the generational shift is already well underway.
7. Rethinking the Marketing Mix
I hold a view that is probably uncomfortable for most marketing organisations: technology companies should meaningfully reduce marketing spend in favour of free tier investment.
I understand why this is a hard argument to make internally. Marketing spend produces attributable metrics. Pipeline influenced, leads generated, impressions delivered. Free tier investment produces outcomes that are diffuse, long horizon, and resistant to attribution. The CIO who advocates for your platform in a 2028 procurement decision because they built something meaningful with your free tier in 2024 is almost impossible to trace back to that original free tier investment in any marketing analytics framework.
But the influence is real and it is durable in a way that no campaign achieves. You can say anything you want about a product through marketing. You can claim reliability, performance, security posture, developer experience, and operational simplicity until every available channel is saturated. None of it carries the weight of having used the product yourself, watched it perform under real conditions, seen it recover from real failures, and built genuine intuition about its architectural strengths and constraints.
The most credible advocate for any technology platform is someone who has built with it. The most credible moment to test platform loyalty is when things go wrong in production. Marketing cannot create either of those conditions. A generous free tier can.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding embedded in how many enterprise technology vendors think about who actually buys their products. Most enterprise software is not bought by lawyers or sourcing teams. It is bought by engineers. Sourcing teams negotiate contracts and lawyers review them, but the decision about which platform gets shortlisted, which architecture gets proposed to leadership, and which vendor gets championed internally is made by the technical people who will live with the choice. Those people make their recommendations based on product knowledge, hands-on experience, and the intuition that comes from having actually built something with the technology. Embedding that knowledge in the market is not a nice to have. It is the primary sales motion, whether vendors recognise it or not. Every engineer who has meaningful free tier experience with your product is a potential internal champion in a future procurement cycle. Every engineer who has never touched your product, because the access gate was too high, is not.
Cloudflare has clearly internalised this. Their free tier is not a reluctant concession to market norms. It is a deliberate investment in developing the next generation of platform advocates. The breadth of capability they make available at no cost, spanning network security, edge compute, DNS, analytics, and Zero Trust access, reflects a confidence that the product will demonstrate its own value to the people who use it.
That confidence is justified. It worked on me.
8. Conclusion: Experience is the Proof of Concept
The technology industry has a persistent tendency to over-invest in the proxies for value rather than value itself. Brand recognition, analyst rankings, conference presence, and content marketing are all proxies. They describe a product from a distance. They cannot substitute for the experience of building with it, debugging it at midnight, watching it absorb an attack, or navigating an outage with enough architectural understanding to maintain composure.
Free tier products close the distance between description and experience. They are the most honest form of marketing because they are not marketing at all. They are just the product, made accessible.
For Cloudflare specifically, the free tier has been transformative in how I understand and advocate for the platform. The journey was not without friction. Early knowledge gaps, infrastructure concerns in the South African market, and a difficult period of platform instability all created genuine pressure points. But the depth of understanding that free tier access enabled was exactly what allowed those pressure points to be navigated rather than becoming exit triggers.
For Slack, the contraction of free tier generosity has had the opposite effect, redirecting communities and the professional development of their members toward competing platforms in ways that will compound as career trajectories advance.
The lesson is straightforward even if the organisational will to act on it is not. Invest in free tiers. Invest generously. The future pipeline you are building is less visible than the one your sales team can point to today, but it is deeper, more durable, and ultimately more valuable. Let people experience your product. Trust that it is good enough to speak for itself. If it is not, that is the more important problem to solve.
Andrew Baker is the Chief Information Officer at Capitec Bank in South Africa. He writes about enterprise architecture, cloud infrastructure, banking technology, and leadership at andrewbaker.ninja.