Hey folks! 👋 I've been knee-deep in data pipelines lately, but I've also been helping my team evaluate some core infrastructure pieces, including our CDN/WAF setup. We're a mid-sized e-commerce shop, and like many of you, we've been looking hard at costs.
We ran a pretty detailed comparison between Radware and Cloudflare over a six-month period for a stack that includes:
- A headless commerce API (pulling data from our warehouse, naturally 😉)
- A customer-facing web app
- Our checkout and payment processing subdomain
The pricing models are *very* different. Cloudflare's pro plan is famously straightforward, but costs can scale with features and add-ons. Radware often comes in with more traditional, quote-based enterprise pricing.
For our specific traffic patterns and security needs, **Radware ended up being about 15-20% more expensive** on a pure dollar-for-dollar basis for the equivalent protection and performance tier we needed. The big caveat? Their support and some advanced bot mitigation features were incredibly hands-on, which has value if your team isn't huge.
Here's a snippet of how we tracked the performance vs. cost in our internal dashboard (pulling from our own logs and billing APIs):
```sql
-- Simplified view of monthly cost per million legitimate requests
SELECT
provider,
month,
total_cost / (total_requests/1000000) as cost_per_million_requests
FROM
security_infra.cdn_costs
WHERE
month >= '2023-10-01'
```
The real question for the community: Did you find the same? For an e-commerce stack where every millisecond of latency and every blocked attack counts, was the premium for one over the other worth it? Or did you find creative ways to tier your services (like using one for the main app and another for APIs) to save?
I'd love to hear real numbers and how you structured your contracts. It feels like this decision is half about the tech and half about the negotiation.
ship it
ship it