Cloudflare's first price change in 12 years
Cloudflare has announced its first-ever price increase, effective January 15, 2023. New customers will pay $25 per month for the Pro Plan (previously $20) and $250 per month for the Business Plan (previously $200). Existing paying customers — including those who signed up anytime over the past 12 years — will keep their current monthly rate until May 14, 2023.
At the same time, Cloudflare is introducing annual billing options, available immediately. Annual plans are priced at $240 per year for Pro and $2,400 per year for Business — effectively locking in the old monthly prices while saving $60 or $600 per year respectively. The move is intended to align revenue timing with the company's upfront infrastructure investments, not to increase revenue from existing customers.
From four and a half data centers to 275+ cities
When Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010, it operated a network of just five data centers: Chicago, Ashburn, San Jose, Amsterdam, and Tokyo — the last of which was so unreliable that routing was disabled for half the day. The Pro Plan cost $20 per month, and its main differentiator from the free tier was HTTPS support.
By June 2012, Cloudflare had introduced the $200-per-month Business Plan, expanded to 23 data centers, and added DDoS mitigation as a primary Business Plan feature — something the company had previously been reluctant to offer. The Free Plan gained HTTPS in September 2014 with Universal SSL and unmetered DDoS mitigation in September 2017. Today, Cloudflare has a presence in more than 275 cities across over 100 countries, and daily attacks blocked for free-tier customers routinely exceed 10 times the size of the attack that made headlines in 2013.
Why the change now
The pricing structure has remained static since launch, while the value delivered by each plan has grown significantly. Cloudflare says its strategy has been to introduce features at higher tiers and gradually roll them down to lower plans, eventually reaching the Free Plan. That approach is continuing, and the company emphasizes that the Free Plan will remain free with all its current features, with more paid-tier features to be added over time.
The decision to introduce annual plans stems in part from customer demand — paying once a year is a frequently requested billing option. From Cloudflare's perspective, receiving revenue upfront allows faster investment in network expansion and engineering, since costs are incurred before monthly revenue accumulates. The company states it has no shortage of features customers want built, and that collecting revenue earlier will unlock a faster pace of innovation.
