On Vendor Lock-In and Cloudflare

Honest Dev say: "Freedom is illusion. Value is real."

This is a collection of thoughts on vendor lock-in, the fear of it, and why I have decided to stop worrying about it.

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The Sacred Wisdom

Every developer has heard the gospel. Thou shalt not lock thyself to a vendor. Thou shalt remain portable. Thou shalt be free.

• The Advice

• "Don’t use proprietary APIs."

• "Always have an exit strategy."

• "What if they raise prices? What if they shut down?"

• "Use open standards. Stay agnostic. Keep your options open." In the voice of that famous racecar developer. not the lambo guy

• The Reality

• This advice is correct.

• It is also easier said than done.

• Much easier.

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The Illusion of Freedom

Some developers advocate for self-hosting. Get a VPS. Run your own servers. Own your infrastructure. Be free.

• The Argument

• "I use a VPS. I’m not locked in."

• "I self-host everything. Complete control."

• "I can migrate anytime."

• The Truth

• Your VPS runs on someone else’s hardware.

• Your "freedom" depends on Hetzner not changing their TOS.

• Your "independence" relies on DigitalOcean not raising prices.

• Your "control" assumes AWS will keep that instance type available.

The uncomfortable truth: Unless you own the metal, the power supply, the network backbone, and the building it sits in, you are locked into someone’s platform. You are just choosing which lock.

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The Cloudflare Situation

Cloudflare has been quietly building everything. And not quietly. Mostly not quietly.

• What They Have

• Domain registration. Buy your domain.

• DNS. Point it somewhere.

• Workers. Run your code at the edge.

• Pages. Host your frontend.

• R2. Store your files. No egress fees.

• D1. SQLite at the edge.

• KV. Key-value storage.

• Durable Objects. Stateful compute.

• Queues. Background jobs.

• Rate limiting. Bot protection. DDoS mitigation. SSL.

• Workflows. (I haven’t used this yet)

• What They Are Building

• Email sending. The last piece. For my current needs. When this ships, it is a complete platform.

• Domain to deployment to email to security. End to end. One dashboard.

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The Confession

I have thought about vendor lock-in. I have considered the risks. And I have decided:

• I am going all in.

• All my domains. Cloudflare.

• All my sites/APIs. Cloudflare Workers.

• All my storage. R2.

• All my databases. D1.

• The Reasoning

• Even if I am locked in, I have already benefited too much.

• THE DASHBOARD IS GETTING THE GREATEST FACELIFT EVER.

• The pricing is aggressive. In the good way.

• The integration between services is seamless.

• I am shipping faster than I ever have.

The math: Years of productivity gains versus the hypothetical future where I need to migrate. I will take the gains.

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The Acknowledgment

This is not advice. This is a personal choice. Here is what I acknowledge:

• I could be wrong. Cloudflare could change. They could raise prices. They could sunset services. Corporations do that.
• I might change my mind. In a year. In five years. Maybe tomorrow. Preferences evolve. Situations change.
• But today? Today I am putting all my eggs in one orange basket. And I am okay with it.

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Conclusion

Vendor lock-in is real. The fear of it is valid. But the fear of it can also paralyze you into building nothing while waiting for the perfect, portable, future-proof solution that does not exist.

Sometimes you pick a platform. Sometimes you commit. Sometimes you accept the trade-off and ship.

Lock me in, Orange Cloud. I am ready.

Still building. Still shipping. (On Cloudflare, obviously).