That's the site owner demanding payment via cloudflare, not cloudflare unilaterally deciding to charge money (as far as I can tell at least).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

Looks like The Verge either set up an excessively tight pay-per-crawl policy or doesn't want IA scraping their stuff.

Cloudflare enabled blocking by default. People were on X complaining about it.

Blocking access to everyone or to scraping crawlers?

They have detailed stats about the behavior of all visitors, including how bot-like they are and how likely they are to scrape your (their users’) content.

Cloudflare offers a service to website owners to do that, yes. It’s the owners’ decision if they want to monetize on the content.

Is it that bad that Cloudflare offers people these choices?

Not restricted to CF

https://web.archive.org/web/20250826113041if_/https://www.in...