Cost

A cheap Cloudflare alternative — because nothing is upsold

The price of edge protection is rarely the sticker on the plan you are on. It is the tier you get pushed onto the day you need a waiting room, a managed ruleset or a raw log. Itnetic puts every feature on every plan and charges for size alone: free, €5, €29, €99.

Two things get called "cheap" and only one of them is worth having. The first is a low price for a stripped product, where the number is small because most of the software is switched off. The second is a low price for the whole product, where the number is small because you are buying less capacity rather than fewer capabilities.

Itnetic is the second kind. There is one product and every plan gets all of it — Layer-7 mitigation, managed and custom WAF, IP reputation, rate limits, waiting room, per-request logs, origin load balancing, game-server protection, alerts, API and CDN. Plans differ by two numbers only: how many domains you point at us, and how much legitimate traffic we deliver.

We will not put a number on anyone else’s plan here — their prices are theirs to publish and they change. What the table does is line up each capability against the cheapest Itnetic plan that has it, and against the plan tier it is documented as being available from elsewhere.

What it costs to have it

The cheapest plan that includes each capability

Itnetic prices are our own, correct on 10 September 2026. The right column states plan availability from public documentation and no price.

CapabilityCheapest Itnetic planAvailable from (Cloudflare)
Layer-7 DDoS mitigationFreeEvery plan
CDN cachingFreeEvery plan
Automatic TLS certificatesFreeEvery plan
Managed OWASP WAF filtersFreePaid plans
Custom WAF rulesFreePlan-dependent limits
IP reputation + verified-bot allowlistFreePlan-dependent
Rate limitingFreePlan-dependent
Waiting room / virtual queueFreeBusiness and Enterprise
Per-request logs with the verdictFreeEnterprise (Logpush)
Origin load balancing with failoverFreePaid add-on
Bring-your-own PEM certificateFreeHigher plans
Private bucket origins (SigV4 signing)FreeVia additional products
Minecraft server protectionFree — 1 server, 5 playersPlan-dependent (Spectrum)
Attack alerts by email and DiscordFreePlan-dependent
Public REST APIFreeEvery plan
2 domains / 10 GB delivered traffic€5 per monthSee their pricing page
5 domains / 50 GB delivered traffic€29 per monthSee their pricing page
10 domains / 1 TB delivered traffic€99 per monthSee their pricing page

About this comparison

Compiled from Cloudflare’s own public documentation and plan pages on 10 September 2026, and describing feature availability by plan at that date. Plan contents change — check Cloudflare’s current pages before making a decision. Cloudflare is a trademark of Cloudflare, Inc.; Itnetic Technologies is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Cloudflare, Inc. Prices named on this page are Itnetic’s own; this page makes no claim about any other provider’s pricing, performance, capacity or availability.

What the free plan actually is

One domain, 2 GB of delivered traffic a month, one Minecraft server with five concurrent players — and every feature in the product, none of them disabled, throttled to a demo or watermarked. No card, no trial clock, no expiry. For a brochure site, a portfolio, a small shop or a personal project, this is very often the entire answer, and the paid tiers only ever enter the picture when the bandwidth runs out.

  • Attack traffic is excluded from the quota, so a flood cannot spend your free allowance.
  • The waiting room, the managed WAF and the raw request log are all on it.
  • Nothing about it is a lead magnet — there is no sales follow-up, because there is no sales team.

Why the ladder is only about size

Feature gating exists because it works: the moment you need something is the moment you have the least leverage. We priced the other way round on purpose. €5 a month buys 2 domains and 10 GB. €29 buys 5 domains and 50 GB. €99 buys 10 domains and 1 TB. €1,000 buys unlimited domains and 5 TB. At every step the software is identical — you are buying capacity, which is the thing that genuinely costs us more when you use more of it.

The cost of an attack is not on the invoice

Bandwidth-metered protection has an unpleasant property: an attack spends your quota, and the bill arrives after the outage. Itnetic classifies every response the edge generated as mitigation — challenge pages, redirect hops, rate-limit 429s, WAF blocks and the over-quota page itself — and subtracts those bytes before metering. A flood cannot bill you, cannot push you into an overage, and cannot trip the very suspension it caused. Cache hits stay billable, because that is real traffic reaching real people.

Cheap is not the same as small

Be clear about what the low price is not buying. Our footprint is three points of presence — Frankfurt, Beauharnois and Singapore — and the volumetric layer upstream of the first two is a 500 Gbps network. That is a real number, published rather than implied, and it is smaller than the largest networks in the industry. If you need a contractual capacity guarantee or an anycast presence in fifty countries, the cheap option is the wrong option and you should buy accordingly.

Free months and custom plans

Two things exist outside the ladder. Sponsored plan floors come through partner programmes — an accelerator, a hosting partner, a community — and set a minimum plan for the accounts they cover, without closing off buying a higher plan normally. Custom plans exist for anyone whose shape does not fit the published tiers: more bandwidth, more domains, specific mitigation rules. Both are arranged by email, not by a form that books a call.

FAQ

Cloudflare alternatives: common questions

What is the cheapest Cloudflare alternative?

Itnetic’s free Starter plan carries every feature in the product — Layer-7 mitigation, managed WAF, custom rules, waiting room, per-request logs, load balancing, CDN and API — with one domain and 2 GB of delivered traffic a month, no card required. Paid plans start at €5 a month for 2 domains and 10 GB.

Is the free plan limited in features?

No. It is limited in size. One domain, 2 GB of delivered traffic and one Minecraft server with five concurrent players — with the same software as the €1,000 plan.

What do I actually pay for as I grow?

Domains and delivered bandwidth, and nothing else. €5 for 2 domains and 10 GB, €29 for 5 and 50 GB, €99 for 10 and 1 TB, €1,000 for unlimited domains and 5 TB.

Is Itnetic cheaper than Cloudflare?

We will not quote anyone else’s prices on our own site, because they are not ours to state and they change. The structural claim we will make is that you never move up an Itnetic tier to unlock a capability — every tier has every feature — so the comparison to run is between the plan you would need there and the plan you would need here.

Will an attack push me over my bandwidth limit?

No. Mitigated bytes — challenge pages, blocked requests, rate-limit responses — are reported separately and subtracted before your quota is metered. The attack does not spend your allowance.

Are there hidden costs, setup fees or contracts?

No setup fee, no contract, no minimum term. Monthly card billing, cancel whenever. The only thing not on the price list is a custom plan, which is arranged by email.

What is the catch with a cheap provider?

The honest one is footprint. Three points of presence and a 500 Gbps volumetric layer upstream of two of them is smaller than the industry’s largest networks, and we publish that rather than implying otherwise. If a contractual capacity guarantee is a requirement, buy from someone who can sign one.

Other comparisons

Same method, different provider — feature availability by plan, with the date it was checked.

Try it on one domain.

Two DNS records, no nameserver change, free plan with no card.