But the gist of it is that CF sales are really good at identifying users that are both locked into their offerings and big enough to be able to sign an expensive contract.

CF do have an excellent offering and workers, in particular, are amazing for many things.

Once the above conditions hit though, you will invariably get a call from the sales team. There is no free lunch.

as I said in another comment, if you allow yourself to become deeply intertwined with a 3rd party service provider that's on you

So if cloudflare’s offer is really unlimited and free, they haven’t exceeded it.

I'd be shocked if CF actually allowed you to use a couple hundred PB/month for free. And that's still finite!!

Right. But the answer to the question posed in the title - "Why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?" - is that the bandwidth is not, in fact, unlimited.

At the start of this thread, i_have_an_idea said "The reason it's free and with unlimited bandwidth is that it's not" I think they, you, and I all agree on that.

What I don't understand is the other people in this thread, who seem to take cloudflare's marketing puffery at face value.

OP said, "Unless you stay very small ... you'll realize the service is neither unlimited nor free" ... is what I commented on.