Cloudflare's latest invoice to me shows a bill of $1 for load balancing (I'm leaving out the billing for other services). The small number is not what's important here, so don't focus on that.
The Cloudflare load balancing service gives 500000 DNS queries for free, then $0.50 for each additional block of 500000 "authoritative DNS queries against Cloudflare's name servers": https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005254367-Billing-for-Load-Balancing
The bill shows 1.2 million DNS queries. If that is true then the pricing is correct.
The problem is there were only about 2.2 million total HTTP requests that went through Cloudflare that month. When you consider that most visits to my website result in over 30 HTTP requests over the 3 minutes the average user spends on the website, AND that most of my visitors are active users who regularly visit the website, I find it hard to comprehend that over HALF of ALL HTTP requests resulted in an authoritative DNS query.
Furthermore, the Cloudflare document I linked above says this: "You can reduce the number of authoritative DNS queries by configuring your Load Balancer as "proxied" (orange cloud) for your HTTP(S) services". All my requests go through the "orange cloud". So if that wasn't the case, how many DNS queries would there be? All 2.2 million HTTP requests?
Maybe I'm missing something here? Hence the Ask HN.