It's interesting to me that Akamai hasn't changed their model somewhat away from the "Call Sales for More Info" plan.
They don't have every feature Cloudflare does, but they do have many of them. But they refuse to serve any market other than the high end. I figured they would have at least added an instant signup for a mid-tier plan by now. There is a free trial, but post-trial pricing is opaque.
Well, Cloudflare's free tier costs money, but it was a good way to get people using the service, and now it's part of the ethos and culture people expect from Cloudflare.
By the time Akamai was being challenged by Cloudflare, they already had such a marketshare it probably wasn't worth racing to the bottom. Until Cloudflare is actually taking Akamai customers, I don't think they'll change.
I didn't suggest you did. I am simply saying that Cloudflare started with a Free plan which helped build the company. So Cloudflare took on the smaller customers by design, as evident from the Free tier of accounts.
So, by the time Cloudflare started really going after meaningful enterprises, it was a race to the bottom for Akamai if they wanted to kill off CF.
Yes Cloudflare has taken some Akamai customers, but when I was working there, it was pretty well established that we didn't directly go after existing Akamai customers. It was a losing battle for Cloudflare. Akamai had a far superior streaming service and there was no way Cloudflare could adequately compete against them in the space where Akamai retained most of their customers.
I'm not as up-to-date on the CDN wars, but I am pretty sure thats still the case. Cloudflare launched a streaming platform, but it still couldn't compete directly against Akamai. Cloudflare has decided that it wants to do everything decently in an agnostic way because it allows them to pick up a wider range of businesses vs being force to go head to head with Akamai or Fastly. Both of those providers offer similar cache response times, and in some cases are much faster than Cloudflare. So, Cloudflare tries really hard to not lock itself into fighting with CDNs directly. We viewed Amazon as a more direct competitor vs Akamai.
They don't have every feature Cloudflare does, but they do have many of them. But they refuse to serve any market other than the high end. I figured they would have at least added an instant signup for a mid-tier plan by now. There is a free trial, but post-trial pricing is opaque.