I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.

I'm thinking the opposite might be the way to go here.

We already know that "retaliation" comes from the US government regardless if you did something or not, so most of us (Europeans) have stopped pretending there is a way of preventing it.

Even more, if we piss off Trump enough, he might be dumb enough to try to block European access to CloudFlare, or something similar and maybe even dumber.

So with this, maybe the goal should actually be to try to piss off Trump and the US administration as much as possible, in order for them to start reacting and cutting off some stuff, so we (again, Europeans) basically gets forced off CloudFlare et al.

Lots of companies already finished moving away from storing their primary data in the US, lots of companies is in process of doing so (albeit some look like they'll take forever) but also lots of companies still aren't prepared for the future, would be nice if US government could make the decision a bit easier for them to make :)

I wanted to check if the 5 customers for which I already did a change on their Cloudflare settings today where on the list, but can't do.

Maybe our countries are just small enough to not be overwhelmed by traffic? Most websites I've built and launched for Spanish national companies, that only have other Spaniards as users and customers, haven't needed any CDN at all, because you don't suddenly get 1K req/s. Meanwhile, launch a global website in English, that even get the slightest amount of popular, and all of a sudden you reach 1K req/s very quickly. Add on top that people usually don't even give two cents about performance, and adding CDN on top as a saving grace seems like an easy tradeoff.

So, why add a CDN when you don't need it? :) Probably 80% of everything I've ever deployed never needed a CDN in the first place, but I also save it as a thing in my toolbox to be used sparingly, rather than a default thing I slap on top of everything.

Also, funny that their page with for "Companies running Cloudflare" says there are only "887 European organisations using Cloudflare."

You're delusional if you think that $200/month is appropriate for a small business to pay to host a website... Most websites don't need a CDN nor DDOS protection, you need to configure your webserver to rate limit stuff that suck bandwidth/CPU from you, but besides that, you've basically fallen for the marketing from Cloudflare that everything requires CDN and that somehow $200/month is a small amount of money for a small business.

If you have a very inefficient backend (maybe legacy project?), you have massive amount of traffic (say 100K req/s or above) or you really must have sub-500ms latency absolutely everywhere in the world, then it might make sense to slap a CDN (or similar) on top of that.

In pretty much any case outside of that, it makes no sense to waste the time, money or effort on CDNs. But, all the CDN companies seemingly have convinced half the internet that you absolutely must use a CDN, otherwise you'll get hacked/broke/killed/sent to the moon, and they've been successful with this campaign too seemingly.