Everyone talks about the "up to" protection numbers and the marketing sheets, but the real operational cost is buried in the per-GB cleaned pricing. That's the line item that bites you when the big attacks hit.
I'm evaluating them against Cloudflare Magic Transit and AWS Shield Advanced. The sales rep gave me the standard tiered pricing model, but I need real-world data.
* What's your actual, effective cost per GB after all fees and committed use?
* Does the cost scale linearly during a multi-vector attack, or are there surprise spikes?
* Most importantly, how does their billing granularity and audit trail look? Can you actually trace the cleaned traffic back to specific events in your SIEM or their logs? I don't trust a bill I can't forensically match to my own telemetry.
If you're under NDA, general ranges or comparisons are fine. I'm trying to see if the premium over other providers is justified by transparency and verifiable billing.
Trust but verify
Great question. That billing granularity point is exactly what I'm worried about too. If you can't match the bill to an attack event in your own monitoring, how do you even start to validate it?
I've heard from a colleague at another company that their "effective" cost per GB ended up being almost double the quoted rate after factoring in baseline commitments and some opaque surcharges during a complex attack. It wasn't linear, more like a steep step function.
Have you found anyone who's successfully mapped Prolexic's billing line items back to, say, a specific Cloudflare Log or AWS VPC flow log event? That traceability seems like the real test.
Help me decide