Cloudflare's free plan is very good, and for a small business with one website it is often the correct answer. This post is about the specific point where that stops being true — and it is almost always the same point: the second domain, or the first feature behind a per-zone paywall.
The per-zone problem
Cloudflare's paid plans are priced per zone. A zone is a domain. That is the single fact that determines whether Cloudflare is cheap or expensive for a small business, because small businesses accumulate domains: the main site, the .co.uk, the old brand you still redirect, the staging domain, the client sites if you're an agency.
Cloudflare Pro, per zone CDNShark Basic, per account
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1 domain $20/mo 1 domain $9.99/mo
3 domains $60/mo 3 domains $9.99/mo
5 domains $100/mo 5 domains $9.99/mo
10 domains $200/mo 10 domains $9.99/mo
11th+ $1.00/mo each
$20/mo is the annual rate; includes 100 GB transfer,
monthly billing is $25/zone. then $0.02/GB. 50 pull zones.This is not a criticism of Cloudflare's pricing — per-zone billing is coherent, and their free tier subsidises an enormous amount of the web. It is simply the mechanism that makes a ten-domain business a $200/month customer, and that is the situation where looking around pays.
What a small business actually needs from a CDN
In practice the list is short and specific:
| Need | Cloudflare Free | CDNShark Basic ($9.99) |
|---|---|---|
| TLS certificates | Yes, all zones | Yes, 10 domains |
| Authoritative DNS | Yes | Yes — own anycast prefix |
| Caching + cache rules | Basic; page rules limited | Cache rules by extension or path prefix, custom TTL |
| WAF | Managed ruleset is paid | Included — basic / strict |
| Bot / JS challenge | Yes | Included — PoW challenge, two modes |
| Country blocking | Limited on free | Included — allow or block by country |
| Rate limiting | Limited on free | Four modes per site, plus 100 r/s per IP |
| Hotlink protection | Yes | Included — referrer allow/block list |
| Object storage | R2, billed separately | 10 GB included, S3-compatible |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | 100 GB, then $0.02/GB |
Read that last row before the others. Cloudflare's free bandwidth is unmetered and CDNShark's is not. If your site is heavy and your budget is zero, Cloudflare Free wins and no amount of feature comparison changes it.
A worked example
A small agency with six client domains, moderate traffic, wanting a WAF and country blocking on each:
Cloudflare Pro 6 zones x $20/mo (annual) = $120.00/mo
(WAF managed rules, per zone)
CDNShark Basic 1 account, 10 domains included = $9.99/mo
300 GB transfer: 100 incl.
+ 200 GB @ $0.02 = $4.00/mo
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$13.99/moThe gap is per-zone billing, not per-byte pricing. Reverse the shape — one domain, three terabytes a month — and Cloudflare's free plan costs nothing while CDNShark bills roughly $60. Work out which shape you are before switching.
What else lands on the same bill
The thing that usually decides it for a small business is not the CDN at all — it is that the CDN account also covers things they were buying separately:
- Anycast DNS on a dedicated prefix (208.78.78.78), authoritative, included
- S3-compatible object storage — 10 GB on Basic, then $0.02/GB, with browser-direct uploads
- Private origin tunnels — five on Basic. Serve a site from a machine with no public IP and no port forwarding
- SharkCaptcha — five sites included, an invisible proof-of-work CAPTCHA for your contact and signup forms
- HLS video with transcoding, encryption, and signed playback tokens
- Web hosting, email, and VPS on the same account if you want them
For a business currently paying for a CDN, a DNS provider, a storage bucket, and a CAPTCHA service separately, consolidation is usually worth more than the per-gigabyte rate.
Honest limitations for a small business
- Metered bandwidth. A viral week produces a bill. Cloudflare's free plan does not.
- 11 edge PoPs — Fremont, Kansas, Beauharnois, London, Gravelines (×2), Limburg, Warsaw, Delhi, Sylhet, Singapore. If your customers are in Brazil, Japan, or Australia, Cloudflare will be faster for them, full stop.
- No HTTP/3 or Brotli at the edge today. HTTP/2 is live as of August 2026.
- Smaller DDoS capacity. Rate limiting, threat-feed blocklists, geo blocking, and a shield tier — not Cloudflare-scale absorption.
- No uptime SLA on self-serve plans.
- Smaller company. Support is responsive but there is no 24/7 NOC.
The decision, honestly
Stay on Cloudflare Free if you have one or two domains, no WAF requirement, and heavy bandwidth. It is a better deal than anything anyone can sell you.
Look at CDNShark if you are already paying Cloudflare per zone across several domains, if you want a WAF and rate limiting without a per-zone upgrade, or if you would rather have DNS, storage, tunnels, and CAPTCHA on one $9.99 invoice than four separate ones.
The honest test: count your zones, then multiply. If that number is under $20, stay where you are.