Transit in some countries, like India, genuinely is that expensive. Keep in mind it doesn’t cost Cloudflare any more to serve Indian traffic from Marsaille than to serve non-peered French traffic from that colo - they aren’t paying the cost of getting traffic between India and France.
The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider.
In anycase, then they should document it clearly that they have unacceptable insertion latency in india and the free plan is entirely unusable for india. Instead of advertising '10 pops in india!!'
> The traffic still has to flow from an india provider to the international leg and back via the domestic provider.
Right, but Cloudflare doesn't have to pay for it in that case. If Cloudflare sends you to their Indian POP, then they have to pay their Indian service provider for traffic. If they send you to their France POP, then they have to pay their French ISP for traffic. The Indian provider cannot claim any of Cloudflare's traffic in that case, because the Indian service provider wouldn't have any relationship with Cloudflare
This is very standard for places with high ISP costs, like South Korea and India. You can see a lot of discussion about it online. I agree with you that Cloudflare should be more transparent if / when they make different routing decision for Free/Pro plans based on bandwidth costs, but I don't think their decision itself is unreasonable at all. Indian bandwidth is very expensive.
You would think Cloudflare would be in a position to do something about it, like they did with several cloud services in their Bandwidth Alliance. It would be a win-win-win for networks to interconnect better in India, it just can't happen stepwise because any individual step is a lose for somebody.
