https://dns.he.net/ works for me, though your requirements may be different.

Highly recommended by me. Free (up to 50 domains) and ns[2-5] are anycasted.

DNS only customers were totally unaffected by this web proxy bug.

Sure, but maybe he doesn't want to do business with Cloudfare anymore?

Right. The bug doesn't affect me, but I don't like how they responded to this.

Actually I just realized that although I only really wanted cloudflare for dns, cloudflare http proxy is on by default. I had turned them off on some of my sites but not all.

I didn't look too hard but didn't see any similar free services with full DNS management and an API for cache validation. Would love a suggestion here too!

Why not just pay for something like Route53? It's very cheap.

Isn't that an AWS thing?

AWS? Cheap? Really?

Route53 might as well be free. Yes it's AWS, but it's costing me less than a dollar a month on a domain that has trended here several times.

AWS isn't cheap or expensive. It's a bundle of services and you're free to use any combination of them. Route53 can be used independently and yes it's very cheap.

I use Route 53 myself and it's under $3 for several domains. Google Cloud DNS is even cheaper.

Its NOT free, you are paying with your customers/visitors privacy.