Okay, I know this might get me some side-eye, but I've been digging into this for my team's new project management SaaS app (we're building on a shoestring budget 😅).
We're using Asana and Notion heavily, and everything is remote, so uptime is everything. When I started looking at WAF and DDoS protection, I was immediately overwhelmed by the pricing of some dedicated services. It felt like overkill.
Then I actually tried Cloudflare's free plan. I know, I know, "you get what you pay for." But here's my thing: for our small team and the kind of traffic a typical SMB web app or info site gets, it seems to handle the basics really well. The magic word for me was "always-on" DDoS mitigation. It's just... there. I don't have to configure thresholds or worry about a sudden spike from a weird news mention.
My question for the experts here: Am I being naive? What specific threats or scale levels does the free tier *not* cover that would make it a bad choice for a small business? Like, at what point did you *know* you had to upgrade?
I'm thinking about things like sophisticated bot attacks targeting login, or application-layer stuff. The free WAF rules seem limited, but are they enough to stop the most common junk?
Thx!
I think you've hit on a really important point that gets overlooked. The "always-on" mitigation for network-layer attacks on the free tier is genuinely solid for the traffic profile you described. Where I've seen teams run into the "need to upgrade" moment isn't about a massive DDoS, but about the nuanced application stuff.
The free WAF's limited rule sets became a problem for a client of mine when they started seeing credential-stuffing attacks against their user login. The free managed rulesets blocked the obvious stuff, but couldn't adapt to the pattern of the attack without custom rules, which are a paid feature. They were getting hammered by what looked like "valid" POST requests, just thousands of them from different IPs.
So your intuition about login attacks is right. The free tier is a great shield against being knocked offline. The upgrade trigger often comes when you need finer control to stop an attack that's *using* your application, not just flooding it. For a basic info site or an internal tool, you're probably fine for a long time.
The right tool saves a thousand meetings.