There are other large CDNs like Akamai. They just don't compete with Cloudflare in the consumer sector. It probably doesn't matter for them because enterprise contracts are where all the money is at.

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all offer competitive alternatives for the small business sector. Personally, I find the actual cost of CloudFlare very difficult to reason about in advance of actual use. This is in part because it's easy to miss a bit of the a la carte model you need.

Full disclosure, I work at Google on the SRE team for Cloud CDN. If you want a credible alternative for the CDN part of Cloudflare, our product is extremely fast. We were all very sad for Cloudflare and watched the whole affair closely, as we've got a few customers that use our services alongside Cloudflare's.

The jist of my comment is why nobody else has tried the "liberal free tier" model for a CDN, as it seems to be working for CF.

Sure, but all 3 cloud providers have free tiers for this stuff, don't they?

Not that would work for a CDN use case as far as I know. The cloud providers are notorious for high egress costs.

The pricing for Google Cloud CDN doesn't look outrageous to me.

Sucuri seem to have pretty similar business model, which is a proxy in front of your site that handle security and cdn.

I meant the "CDN with a meaningful free tier" part of the business model. That's why "half the internet" has CF as a single point of failure.

I don't need a free tier. I just need a "basic bitch" tier for my personal usage. Who are some Cloudflare alternatives for this?

Depends on what you want but a very solid free CDN and DNS option is: host your site on netlify and use dns.he.net for your nameservers.

Another good DNS option is dnsimple.com or, indeed, EasyDNS. For even more redundancy, use one provider as your domain registrar and another for your nameservers (and set short TTLs for your zones so you can re-point IPs quickly if you need to).

For the other things Cloudflare offers on their free tier, I'm not sure what good alternatives exist (there must be some, I'm just not familiar with them outside of the obvious AWS alternatives).

Edit: one caveat with above advice, I have no idea if netlify use cloudflare behind the scenes...

Edit 2: For other options, checkout https://www.cdnperf.com/ and https://www.dnsperf.com/

If all you're doing is hosting and CDNing static content, the US cloud providers can do this very, very cheaply.