Friday night at @trybounty we completed our migration away from Netlify over to Cloudflare. Why did we do this? First netlify made a change a couple of months ago that basically blocked our deploys unless every github account on the project had a netlify account also.


Now, we needed to add a bunch of users. Each user is an additional $19 a month. That's not too bad. But, in addition to that Netlify recently dramatically changed their cost structure in a way that would have forced us onto their enterprise plan (which is a way higher fee).



As a startup founder I am now using tons of managed services that have these per-user fees that are becoming ridiculously expensive. I was not about to pay nearly $1000 / month to Netlify for what amounts to static site hosting for my SPA bundles.


The per-user fees are so much harder to stomach when they are completely unrelated to actual usage. We have a monorepo so I have backend engineers that literally never write UI code. Many other user-based SaaS company have similar issues - these models just feel scammy imo



Cloudflare is usage based and not user based. We are paying $20 a month now for Cloudflare pages and will happily pay more when we hit actual usage limits and bandwidth limits on their CDN because the costs will be related to our actual business scaling.


Anyway, we did this Netlify->Cloudflare transition with no downtime. How did we do it? First we wrote new CI jobs to deploy our static React sites to Cloudflare. We have one Remix site that was bit complicated but @marcuswood23 got it working!


Then once we had every project set up on github pages and deploying, we started to shift our CNAMEs over to our domains. However, we were using Netlify as our DNS servers and they had some special "NETLIFY" type DNS records. This was causing us to have invalid SSL certs.


This was because even though we had the CNAME records porting to the correct place for some reason the DNS records were being overridden and Netlify was still trying to serve our sites. We altered out plan and decided we needed to move our DNS servers striaght to cloudflare.


There was no way to export a zone file from Netlify (of course) so @marcuswood23 wrote a script to extract the DNS records from the UI. He sent me a CSV file and I painstakingly changed this to a valid Zone file format. I uploaded the zone file to Cloudflare...


And we very carefully made sure every single DNS record was correct (there were dozens, we have a complex flow with multiple clients & envs). I made sure all of the CNAMEs now pointed to Cloudflare. Lastly, we pointed the DNS servers for the domain to Cloudflare.


And... it worked! We cut over the nameservers to Cloudflare and all our sites started serving from there with new SSL certs.

The frustrating part about all of this was that it was totally unnecessary and we would have been happy to stick with Netlify...


But having to onboard every single user that contributes to our monorepo to Netlify (regardless of it was just backend code), and blocking deploys with some idiotic approval process and charging us per user pissed us off so much we put in the effort to switch.


There are so many opportunities to compete with existing technology companies with business models / billing models that don't fit the use cases of their customers it's honestly remarkable. There is opportunity everywhere to compete with incumbents!


I think a lot of people will pay 2x to 10x as much as for more user friendly AWS service wrappers (e.g. I can host my sites on S3+Cloudfront). But I don't think people are willing to pay 100x or 1000x as AWS long term unless there is some truly remarkable benefit.


You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/dynamicdoublea/v0rw4lI