Their business model is described in their S1 filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...

* Cloudflare operates at a scale where its caching saves a lot of bandwidth, which saves ISPs money, which makes Cloudflare an attractive partner for peering and co-location.

* CDN is a platform on top of which Cloudflare can offer a lot of additional services that used to be expensive dedicated middleboxes.

They manage to be cheap because it's massively multitenant infra

It's unclear as it shouldn't be possible to be cheap. That said, in a world of data, Cloudflare being a massive man in the middle (MITM) probably means something [1].

[1] Cloudflare decrypts your traffic, reads it, and then forwards it. They see all encrypted data going to and from your website, in plaintext.

This data collection project has a name: "Project Honey Pot" (and had excellent relations with FBI), look closely the story that led to Cloudflare.

https://www.projecthoneypot.org/cloudflare_beta.html

Wow. This is a travesty if I've ever known one. Hopefully, that can be posted and upvoted on HN.

I actually like Cloudflare very much from a technical perspective, so I wouldn't want to hurt them.

In fact, the company vision and values (as the team grew) may have changed over the time, but originally it seems it was somewhat of a different spirit (and closer to a data collection network).