Open-Source AI Was Never Free. Cloudflare Just Stopped Pretending.
Cloudflare’s removal of top open coding models from its free tier exposes the fundamental lie of open-source AI: the models are open, but the infrastructure to run them never was. What looked like democratization was always customer acquisition. Now that the economics have caught up, developers who built on free tiers are learning the hard way that ‘free’ was never a commitment — it was a sales strategy.