Thanks for the detailed perspective. Your setup makes sense for agencies or teams that can manage their own caching, droplets, image formats, and traffic patterns. In that environment a plugin like this is not really needed.
The plugin is aimed at a different group. A lot of WordPress users are not on Cloudflare, do not want to touch DNS, and are not comfortable running their own CDN proxy or tuning image formats. They just want their existing media to load faster without changing their hosting stack.
If you are already keeping everything optimized and have a CDN pattern you like, then you are already covered. This is more for the long tail of smaller sites that will never set up their own caching rules or droplets. It is just a simpler path for them.
But those small clients also do not know much about WordPress and use nearly unlimited traffic hosting. It would be a challenge to explain what your plugin does.
You are right that a lot of those clients are on “unlimited” hosting and never think about bandwidth at all. I am still trying to figure out how big the overlap is between “does not want to touch Cloudflare” and “actually cares about image performance.” This thread is helping me sanity check whether that overlap is real or just in my head.
The plugin is aimed at a different group. A lot of WordPress users are not on Cloudflare, do not want to touch DNS, and are not comfortable running their own CDN proxy or tuning image formats. They just want their existing media to load faster without changing their hosting stack.
If you are already keeping everything optimized and have a CDN pattern you like, then you are already covered. This is more for the long tail of smaller sites that will never set up their own caching rules or droplets. It is just a simpler path for them.