#cost
What things cost and how we keep it down.
2026
What Cloudflare can still do to us
Decision recordWe moved TipBop and TyreStack to Cloudflare in a day and made it the default for everything. This is the case against that, from our own standard: five ways it fails, the limits we accepted, and four conditions that would send us back.
The ten pound rule
Decision recordIn October our GitHub Actions use ran to nearly five times the minutes our plan includes, and a spending cap we kept raising turned two dozen alerts red. On 5 November we set one rule for every metered vendor: free tier or £10 a month.
The outage that moved us to Cloudflare
Decision recordAt 06:02 a Google Cloud zone stopped answering and took two products, both still in beta, with it. Our own review said stay and pay for high availability. By 15:45 we had left anyway. Here is the reasoning, and the objections to it.
The customer pays the fee, so the worker gets every penny
Decision recordOn a £5 tip the customer pays £5.60 and the worker gets exactly £5.00. Taking a cut out of the tip instead loses money on small tips and breaks the one promise TipBop makes. Here is the arithmetic.