What the free plan actually covers.
THE FREE PLAN
DNS hosting Unlimited bandwidth through the proxy SSL between visitor and Cloudflare Basic denial of service protection Caching of static assets Basic firewall rules Page rules, in limited number
For most small business sites, that is sufficient.
WHAT PAID PLANS ADD
More page rules and firewall rules Image optimisation Better analytics and longer retention Faster cache purging More sophisticated bot management Support commitments
WHAT IS GENUINELY WORTH PAYING FOR
If you are under sustained attack, the better protection matters.
If you run a large shop where every hundred milliseconds counts, the optimisation features may pay for themselves.
WHAT IS NOT
Buying a paid plan to fix a slow site that has no caching enabled and unoptimised images.
THE HONEST ADVICE
Start free. It covers what most sites need.
Upgrade when you hit a specific limitation you can name, not because a faster plan exists.
