An article revisiting Matthew Prince’s 2016 explanation outlines how free users contribute attack-detection data, product testing, and customer acquisition, while network scale lowers costs. Profitability figures from that period cannot be treated as current performance. Related official Cloudflare explanations affirm an intention to maintain the free plan while describing spare-capacity use and priority for paying customers. Large-file and video delivery have separate services and conditions, so the free CDN should not be understood as unlimited delivery for all content types.