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Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jgrahamc 4y ago
  I've asked internally to understand this.
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    thanks, much appreciated!
  • tlonny 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • jgrahamc 4y ago
      I replied when this has no upvotes and was nowhere near the front page.
      • Veen 4y ago
        That response misses the point by a wide margin.
        • Etheryte 4y ago
          Not a big surprise given they think HN threads are an acceptable form of customer support for paying customers.
          • FeepingCreature 4y ago
            As the joke goes, "A failure in the outage reporting service can take surprisingly long to notice." When your customer service is failing to handle a case, how exactly are you gonna catch on without using out-of-band signaling?
          • jgrahamc 4y ago
            [deleted]
            • Veen 4y ago
              Friendly advice, stop digging and step away from this thread/talk to your PR team. You're not helping yourself or Cloudflare by responding in this way.
              • jgrahamc 4y ago
                You're right. I'm taking all this too personally.
                • ignoramous 4y ago
  • throwaway6845 4y ago
    I would really like you to clarify your intentions on serving non-HTML content. I say this slightly nervously as a Cloudflare customer who serves some amount of binary data. One message is "it's ok if you're on a paid plan". Another is "it's not ok at any time". My suspicion is that "it's ok unless we notice you". If you could come up with consistent understandable messaging that would help a lot. I don't mind paying (stay competitive against AWS and Hetzner and that's all I need) but the uncertainty is not good.
  • rafaelturk 4y ago
    I really curious about how this unfolds, I was planning to migrate from `AWS Lambda` to `Cloudflare Workers` as a paying customer. I'm basicaly an API with lots of JSON. Why Cloudflare cancel paying Workers customers? Makes no sense to me.
  • nickcw 4y ago
    Can you clarify the terms an conditions about Cloudflare R2 please? On the R2 page https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ we see: > No more egress charges. You shouldn’t have to pay to access your data. Pay no egress charges for data accessed from R2. Our affordable and consistent pricing means no more surprise bills. Whereas I think the non-HTML traffic terms still apply to R2. Or do they?
    • vlovich123 4y ago
      The supplemental terms about the developer platform apply to R2 (https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#cloudflare-developer-platform-cloudflare-workers-cloudflare-pages-workers-kv-durable-objects-and-r2 https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/#cloudflare-de...). Same goes for Workers itself (the Cache api within Workers is also covered under these vs the non-HTML content restriction applies to the normal CDN path).
  • archon810 4y ago
    Will you come back and tell us what happened here?
• Roark66 4y ago
  Looking at this with interest as I've multiple projects on cloudflare now and in development.
  • sanat 4y ago
    Likewise
    • easel 4y ago
      And another
  • sparrish 4y ago
    The lesson here isn't that you can or cannot trust Cloudflare. You can't trust any vendor. Build your system with redundancies and failovers so no 1 vendor can take your system offline.
• sschueller 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
    Problem with blocking Cloudflare traffic as a whole is that you will be blocking Private Relay users too.
    • sschueller 4y ago
      How does apple guarantee that the private relay traffic via cloud flare doesn't include malicious attacks like DDOS from infected machines? I see more and more malicious traffic from cloud flair and cloud flare does not respond to abuse reports.
      • ignoramous 4y ago
        Private Relay has a slice of Cloudflare address space carved out just for it: https://mask-api.icloud.com/egress-ip-ranges.csv https://mask-api.icloud.com/egress-ip-ranges.csv via https://developer.apple.com/support/prepare-your-network-for-icloud-private-relay https://developer.apple.com/support/prepare-your-network-for...
  • luckylion 4y ago
    > Many ISPs have good solutions that work well without you having to break open your SSL to use the service. What are they going to do if a botnet with tens of thousands of IPs are hitting your server? Nullroute it to take the load off their network? Somehow figure out what traffic is legitimate and what isn't and just drop a bunch of stuff?
    • sschueller 4y ago
      Larger ISPs have systems like the ones Netscout[1] and others offer on their edge connections which can classify such traffic and deal with it. If your systems are co-located in a DC or you have your own DC you have access to these ISPs. [1] https://www.netscout.com/product/netscout-aed https://www.netscout.com/product/netscout-aed
• hereforphone 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    No, not at all. Seems like by account was restricted due to https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/supplemental-terms/#cloudflare-developer-platform-cloudflare-workers-cloudflare-pages-workers-kv-durable-objects-and-r2 https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/supplemental-terms/#cloudfl... 2.Cloudflare may, with or without notice to you and without liability of any kind, temporarily limit your storage and/or the number of requests you can make or receive using the Developer Platform for any reason (in its sole reasonable discretion), including without limitation, if processing such requests would put an undue burden on the Cloudflare network, adversely impact the Service, or otherwise threaten the integrity of Cloudflare’s networks.
• davix55 4y ago
  I'm very interested in this. I also have clients with very large usage volumes on CF
• ddtaylor 4y ago
  Welcome to Google I mean Twitter I mean Facebook I mean cloudflare support.
  • rvz 4y ago
    Last but not least, Stripe support.
    • nubinetwork 4y ago
      To be fair, most of the stripe whiners I see on here are trying to do shady shit... like that guy last week who didn't think we'd connect the dots from his last shady stripe scheme.
      • philliphaydon 4y ago
        Got a link? Curious what he was doing!
        • nubinetwork 4y ago
          Actually, my mistake... it was almost 3 weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34383720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34383720 https://web.archive.org/web/20230114202232/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34383720 https://web.archive.org/web/20230114202232/https://news.ycom...
          • fragmede 4y ago
            Ah damn, all it says is "I was advised to remove this post" and what was there before is not in archive.is
            • sokoloff 4y ago
              It’s somewhere in there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34384172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34384172
• sgarg26 4y ago
  i'm about to move a significant amount of traffic to cloudflare. holding off until i see how this is handled. Can you please update this to reflect the total time of service outage and time to resolve. As a busy tech company, this is an unneeded problem. We pay cloudflare to be fast. Not make our sites slow and unresponsive.
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    Outage started around 00:00UTC today. I was able to contact via support chat to confirm it's indeed Cloudflare related issue as wasn't sure as it's not displayed in any form on Cloudflare dashboard that indeed account is restricted. That was around 8AM UTC. Since then I also contacted with sales team (got the details already as they approached me in last few weeks as mentioned before) in order to upgrade to Enterprise plan as it seems like the only solution, but did not get the quote yet and account is still restricted.
    • herodoturtle 4y ago
      > Since then I also contacted with sales team … in order to upgrade to Enterprise plan as it seems like the only solution Talk about coercion. Considering that you weren’t, technically speaking, violating any terms of service, this response from them leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. Good luck, and thank you for sharing this with us all.
      • tardis_thad 4y ago
        Around 12:00UTC today ban has been lifted for my account thanks to @jgrahamc - thanks!
        • BeefWellington 4y ago
          So you got a 12 hour outage over... Some random automated system kicking you off their platform for serving non-HTML in requests, which they demonstrate doing in their documentation? Truly amazing.
      • 4y ago
• ddorian43 4y ago
  How are you using the workers? Is the JSON cached? Where do you get the JSON?
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    I'm using Workers as basically API gateway/smart load balancer to backend services that handle actual load (resource intensive data filtering). Most of the responses are not cached on Cloudflare level. Thing is that I was using Workers for about 4 years already with not issue at at all, I'm aware that I use lots of requests and bandwidth but I just wish I was contacted about mandatory upgrade before effectively turning my service down.
    • ddorian43 4y ago
      How much are you paying for the workers/month? Why didn't you use the load-balancer service?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • ignoramous 4y ago
        > Why didn't you use the load-balancer service? Speaking from experience, if you only need rudimentary L7 load balancing, then Cloudflare Workers is as good as it gets. > How much are you paying for the workers/month? Per my estimate, probably between $600 to $2000 for Workers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639930
        • luckylion 4y ago
          > Speaking from experience, if you only need rudimentary L7 load balancing, then Cloudflare Workers is as good as it gets. What would you do in Workers that you couldn't do with Load Balancing? LB handles origin health, can do traffic steering, session affinity etc included. With Workers, you'd need to take care of all that. I see a point if the Workers do some lifting / caching / transforming etc before passing on the requests, but as a simple load balancer, the actual Load Balancing service seems a better fit.
• iinnPP 4y ago
  I recently signed up to CloudFlare for their Yubi key deal that was still being advertised on their website. A week later I received an email saying only customers subscribed by a certain time could claim the offer. I asked them to delete my data or provide the Yubi offer and they did neither. So they sit in an email folder known as bad companies. Because my data has value and they lied to obtain it for their own gain (aka fraud). In Canada we have private prosecution/rules about falsely acquired data. Every bad story on HN puts me closer to opening that folder up and ensuring my data costs at least 100k. Enough is enough.
  • ecoNoIGGERmy 4y ago
    [dead]
  • danuker 4y ago
    Report them to Consumer Affairs. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/office-consumer-affairs/en/complaint-roadmap https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/office-consumer-affairs/en/...
  • gnu8 4y ago
    There isn’t a practical way to fractionate their revenue or determine what proportion of their profit is derived from your data. This can be proved by the fact that there is no way to make any money with only the data you gave to them separated from the rest of their customers and potential customers. Therefore you are entitled to all of their revenue. Please clean out their shareholders and destroy their business. They deserve this for not cooperating with you. It would be very low cost or low effort to correct their mistake and they are choosing not to because it is easier.
    • dd36 4y ago
      Sure there is a way. In fact, there are many ways. CAC/ conversion ratio would give you the value of a quality lead.
• krimpenrik 4y ago
  Also want to be kept updated on this issue since it touches some clients of mine
• cultofmetatron 4y ago
  Literally just sent an email to my devops guys to move off cloudflare asap. This cavalier lack of respect is a diservice and insult to all the people who rely on my product for their livelihood.
  • cybrox 4y ago
    Are there any good alternatives that you (or him) already looked into?
    • ignoramous 4y ago
      Not OP, but we run two environments each of our service on Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, and Fly.io (a small service albeit, 200 to 300 requests per second). In the event one is down, we switch to the other (via DNS).
      • sparrish 4y ago
        This, my system architect friends, is the proper response. Do NOT put all your eggs in 1 basket. Build redundancies and failovers so no 1 vendor can shutdown your business.
    • cultofmetatron 4y ago
      we had already been discussing amazon s3 since we are on aws. As clunky as aws can be, you can get in touch with a human if you need to.
  • kkielhofner 4y ago
    You’re changing your arch because you saw a one-sided completely unverified post on HN? At this point @jgrahamc has the worst of it - people show up here time after time hoping they can make enough of a stink to get him involved.
    • jgrahamc 4y ago
      When they could just email me (jgc@cloudflare.com)
• dboreham 4y ago
  Sales said something would never happen...
  • badcppdev 4y ago
    That's almost the same as Sales promising that the feature will be available in the next few weeks..
    • onphonenow 4y ago
      Haha - this. Or next quarter etc
• _cenw 4y ago
  I've recently dropped and then readded (a few months later) a zone to Cloudflare for a domain only I ever owned. And they refused to add it for "policy" reasons, so I had to wait a week or so until Cloudflare just unlocked it without providing any rationale. It's not a company I trust to not randomly screw me over out of the blue anymore.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  I went to look at your website to see what the service was about… but of course it’s down :(
  • katsura 4y ago
    You can look at it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20230112195712/https://tardis.dev/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230112195712/https://tardis.dev...
    • TigerTeamX 4y ago
      thanks
• danuker 4y ago
  Cloudflare: MitMaaS https://framagit.org/dCF/deCloudflare/-/blob/master/readme/en.md https://framagit.org/dCF/deCloudflare/-/blob/master/readme/e...
  • grosswait 4y ago
    Good things to keep in mind
  • wrldos 4y ago
    Wow that's a whole lot of ire, rivalling some other large tech firms. Definitely worth investigating. I consider Cloudflare to be an annoyance generally but I hadn't put it in context to what they ultimately have control over.
  • jamespo 4y ago
    All of that is well known surely, it's still the site owners choice, including whether to block tor traffic which is often the source of these issues.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    that site needs an editor. Like a human editor, so that everything is consistent looking. And whatever happened to ngate?
  • andrewstuart 4y ago
    Meh. None of that bothers me.
• vb-8448 4y ago
  Very similar to this other one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235237 I just repost the same comment I put in the above thread > The thing that scary me most is that his business get shut down without any notice period (at least the author not mentioning any previous communications from Cloudflare team about the issue). > This is really a shitty thing from Cloudflare, you cannot shut down an already running business without any notice/grace period.
  • mynameisvlad 4y ago
    I disagree. The other one was a clear case of someone knowingly breaking the TOS (same non-HTML content but in that case they were hosting a service which almost exclusively returns non-HTML content). The OP even admitted in the comments that they knew very well they were breaking the TOS but wanted some notice. I don’t really feel any sympathy for that poster. They knowingly broke the rules, they had to have known that CF could come and shut them down at any time, and they still went ahead and threw the pity party knowing that they are pretty much entirely in the wrong. It’s very much a “play dumb games, win dumb prizes”. Would it be nice for CF to give a heads up? Sure. But I don’t think it’s required, and especially not in an egregious case like that one.
    • tardis_thad 4y ago
      See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642984 I wasn't breaking the ToS at least not 2.8 (non html content) - my point was that I can understand I'm heavy user of the Workers and built-in pricing may not be economically feasible for CF to serve me hence push to Enterprise plan - I get it, just wish it was communicated to me clearly and beforehand my site went down.
      • mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Specifically was talking about the GP comment’s link to the other post, where they very explicitly and knowingly went against the non-HTML clause. They were running some sort of image SaaS product where the vast majority of their (non-Worker) usage was images. I think that case is different than this one because it was very obvious that it was against the rules, to the point where even the OP of that post came in to say that yes, they knowingly violated the TOS but would have appreciated a heads up. The comment I was referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235749 Sorry for the confusion, I tried to separate using “this post” and “that post” but I’m sure I slipped up somewhere there.
• smashah 4y ago
  Are there no laws around account removal/shutdown? In the future I will be actively asking service providers their procedures on account shutdown.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• IanCal 4y ago
  What even is the restriction on returning JSON? One of the examples is explicitly how to return JSON https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/return-json/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/return-js... From the terms > 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content > The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) *or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8*. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service *or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service*. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services. Supplemental terms > The Cloudflare Developer Platform consists of the following Services: (i) *Cloudflare Workers*, a Service that permits developers to deploy and run encapsulated versions of their proprietary software source code (each a “Workers Script”) on Cloudflare’s edge servers; (ii) Cloudflare Pages, a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to collaborate and deploy websites; (iii) Cloudflare Queues, a managed message queuing service; and (iv) Workers KV, Durable Objects, and R2, storage offerings *used to serve HTML and non-HTML content.* I can't quite figure out how to parse this such that workers would be deemed unusable to just run an API. I'd absolutely have gone ahead with using it for an API.
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    Seems like my account was restricted due to https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/supplemental-terms/#cloudfl https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/supplemental-terms/#cloudfl... 2.Cloudflare may, with or without notice to you and without liability of any kind, temporarily limit your storage and/or the number of requests you can make or receive using the Developer Platform for any reason (in its sole reasonable discretion), including without limitation, if processing such requests would put an undue burden on the Cloudflare network, adversely impact the Service, or otherwise threaten the integrity of Cloudflare’s networks. To be fair I'm using lots of requests and bandwidth so could be reason, just if only I got an email about that before shutting everything down.
• vishalchandra 4y ago
  Cloudflare has non-transparent pricing, unlike AWS, which will charge you for every thing with detailed usage tracking. When ever there is non-transparent pricing, it's scary to try and use an infrastructure related service. The sales teams can't go around saying that you are not a profitable customer, and they can't argue with the marketing team to be more honest about pricing on the pricing page. So, end result, let's bump of these small free loaders. Large enterprise deals is what gets us the bonus anyways. I like fly.io pricing in that sense. And I am sure there might be others offering a more transparent pricing, otherwise like me still stuck on AWS.
  • worldofmatthew 4y ago
    fly.io is pretty expensive compared to wholesale bandwidth rates. Especially for Europe.
    • iancarroll 4y ago
      Their bandwidth pricing is competing with AWS, not wholesale bandwidth rates.
  • onphonenow 4y ago
    This is the big issue. There is always tension in these “free” setups. I get more worried when the giveaways / marketing is VC funded - they often end at some point or pressure inside to dial back etc. “We have free egress to Oceania!” - no, you don’t. You are subsidizing that. Given what aws charges and how they charge for almost everything- no reason to be any pressure to move me to another plan. AWS free tiers are relatively minuscule
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    My perspective looking at them and other options for a bandwidth-heavy, largely non-HTML load a couple years ago: 1) All but the top self-serve plan ($200 at the time) wasn't worth anything for a business past the "finding a market" stage. No SLA at all under that level (at least, at the time) 2) The $200 plan, though, is actually a hell of a bargain. You get a lot for it. If your load is almost all HTML/CSS/JS and some light-ish worker use. And (allegedly, see #5) your bandwidth use isn't crazy high. 3) They basically don't care about serving any need between the top self-serve plan and a ~$5,000-to-start Enterprise plan. If you don't fit in the top self-serve but are under that level... 4) Surprisingly, given their reputation at the lower levels of service, in the Enterprise tier, they weren't competitive on bandwidth. If the main thing you need to do is sling bits, you can do that quite a bit cheaper elsewhere. Overall, they seem to want customers who need lots of their services, not just any one component. If you don't need their various corporate VPN type products and a bunch of other stuff, they're a bad fit. 5) We were told by a competitor that OP's experience is common and is often perceived by customers (their perception, mind you) as a bait and switch (see also: that huge gap between self-service and enterprise, in which they offer no options). Now, the competitor has some self-interest there, but even the non-sales guys on the call instantly kinda smirked and shook their heads when I mentioned CloudFlare. 6) We were told incorrect things by CloudFlare's sales folks. If we'd followed their advice, we might be OP.
• mblast311 4y ago
  Well this isn’t good. I’m leading an effort to move some of our services and about a hundred domains over to Cloudflare. Given all of this I think we’re going to have to push pause and see how this shakes out.
• lolcrow 4y ago
  Maybe they booted you because your business model is to use Cloudflare to repeatedly and aggressively scrape data from cryptocurrency exchanges and then resell it for hundreds of dollars a month. Sounds like an abuse of their terms of service to me.
  • ImHereToVote 4y ago
    Is that illegal or something?
    • gambiting 4y ago
      It doesn't have to be illegal to be against the terms of service. Cloudflare can decide how they wish their service to be used.
      • weberer 4y ago
        Is there a clause in the terms of service against it then?
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    Cloudflare is not used at all for data collection (it's not scraping, it's using official exchanges APIs), only for the APIs that serve historical data.
  • sirsinsalot 4y ago
    Aren't all users or CloudFlare doing [ACTIVITY] to resell something for profit? What planet are you on?
• ethereal-haze 4y ago
  Word of warning: don't use cloudflare Or really any service that has it written that they can end your business without notice~
• ignoramous 4y ago
  > ...anyways I get it, perhaps I pay too little and should be on enterprise plan already If you're on Workers Unbound, you're probably paying closer to ~$800/mo for 4b requests; or if you're on Workers Bundled, then ~2000/mo. What were you quoted for the Enterprise plan? I thought those start at $1500/mo?
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    > I thought those start at $1500/mo? I wasn't able to get them to size something down under high-$4,000/m, when I looked at this a couple years ago. They acted like I was being annoying just for thinking there might exist any option between $200 and $5,000. We ended up somewhere else that was much cheaper for the actual service we needed. Every other company in this space I talked to was happy to come up with a plan that fit our needs and didn't include stuff we didn't need, plus their (negotiated, not public) outbound transfer rates were in every case cheaper than what CloudFlare's sales team offered us. They'd even offer high-touch onboarding help in that sub-$5k/m range (I didn't ask, they just offered) I think our spending's actually over $5k/m many months, now, but it'd be even higher at CF since the best rate on transfer they offered us wasn't great. I gather the actual customer demo they want is big, complex enterprises that need tunnels between multiple physical networks, oddball proxying set-ups, and stuff like that. That's not us, so they weren't a good fit—but what's weird is their self-serve plans look like they're trying to court use cases closer to ours, while they have no decent options for smoothly sizing up past that.
    • ignoramous 4y ago
      Thanks. Appreciate your response. Crazy to think that Cloudflare who are super aggressive napping up upstarts looking for cheaper alternatives to the Big 3 (Azure, GCP, AWS), are this incompetent in closing out Enterprise deals. I thought they were as adept at Sales as they are at Engineering.
• TigerTeamX 4y ago
  Sad it happened. This highlights why it is important to reduce your exposure to external services. Right now I just deploy on bare metals servers and are ready to move them if need to. As they say, there's no cloud - just someone's else' computer
  • gtirloni 4y ago
    Do you manage your own global CDN network?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Dowwie 4y ago
  4 Billion requests per month involving 1 Petabyte of traffic doesn't seem like a "small SAAS", at least packet-wise. If its small revenue-wise, addressing that is a business concern as important as having your platform throttled for using the cheapo economy edition tier of whatever you've signed up for with Cloudflare. Did Cloudflare issue any formal communication with you warning about usage and how it violates contractual terms, or did they "ban" you out of nowhere?
  • tiew9Vii 4y ago
    Sounds like OP has spoken with cloudflare previously about their usage/cloudflare services, likely looking to upgrade by the sounds of it but sales maybe gave the impression OP was ok on current level of service. > I would fully understand that I am required to upgrade, but why not sending me an email before shutting down my business completely? I even asked about such scenario on zoom meeting I had with their Sales and they said it will never happen
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      > Sounds like OP has spoken with cloudflare previously about their usage/cloudflare services, likely looking to upgrade by the sounds of it but sales maybe gave the impression OP was ok on current level of service. They've done this to me, too—I read the TOS and tech docs and plan details and ignored them, because according to their own stuff, they were wrong, and "first-tier sales guy said it" isn't a helpful recourse if you get told to leave (so, migration costs) or pay $$$$ because you're violating their documented permitted usage. Hilariously, they also seemed really confused when I brought up a gaming use-case that they had an entire sales landing page for. (Nb I actually like, use, and would recommend CloudFlare for some workloads and use-cases)
  • twawaaay 4y ago
    I worked for a large bank, my internal backend would receive couple orders more requests from other internal apps and users and probably similar traffic. It is very easy (relatively) to build a SaaS platform that serves this amount of traffic and this can be done by even a one determined individual or a small startup team. I don't think it is useful to measure the size of the company in the amount of requests they are serving. Revenue/number of employees are much better measurements saying more about the type of things that are/can be happening. They may have relatively low margins per request and need to get to 4B to get by to pay for couple salaries?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mrjin 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • smallpipe 4y ago
    Lol good luck building anything
  • spoiler 4y ago
    These shallow quippable sentiments needs to stop on HN. If you're a small team, cloud costs are probably less than having to pay X engineers to maintain a highly available infrastructure to meet product SLAs. Saying this is an easy task probably just shows inexperience. If you're a big enterprise, you also pay for SLAs that guarantee availability of those computers. Or pay in house engineers to maintain racks. Sometimes you can rent your own data centre rack (or a dedicated server through a hosting providers, which is a small step up) to host your stuff if you're a small business too, of course. But it's harder and usually more expensive when starting out. Like most things in our industry: it depends. For example business needs, but not all business operate in the same way.
  • ignoramous 4y ago
    Btw, the Internet itself is someone else's cables...
  • drdec 4y ago
    It seems like the issue here was the amount of network resources being used. You can't have any kind of SaaS without using someone else's network.
• dspillett 4y ago
  > when I got approached by Cloudflare sales team I explicitly asked if I can still be on pay as you go/self server model and reply was: Never entirely trust what is said to you to secure/continue a sale, unless you have it written in a contract. > … "Enterprise wise, that's up to you and you could likely get away with utilising self-serve as you go … especially if what sales say to you is couched in vague works like “likely to get away with”.
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    Lesson learned!
  • JimDabell 4y ago
    > Never entirely trust what is said to you to secure/continue a sale, unless you have it written in a contract. This time last week, Cloudflare shut off our access to one of their services we were using because we went over quota. Well, we had actually negotiated overage charges and did actually have this in our contract. They turned the service off anyway instead of applying the overage charges we had agreed. This is one of many things that Cloudflare has totally screwed up. Their services and devex look great from the outside, but when we started to use it for real, we found that it’s all beta quality at best and completely disorganised at an operational level.
    • ddorian43 4y ago
      What was the cost of the overages charges?
    • chronogram 4y ago
      Did you resolve it? If so, did you have to use their HN customer support or did they have a phone number?
      • JimDabell 4y ago
        It was resolved by emailing them directly. It took just under two hours.
• rafaelturk 4y ago
  I really curious about how this unfolds, I was planning to migrate from AWS Lambda to Cloudflare Workers. And we have LOTs of Json, and APIs. Why would they cancel paying Workers customers?
  • batter 4y ago
    If you're looking eagerly to replace human support with searches of someone from CF on HN to help... why not.
• pmezard 4y ago
  Since "there is no such thing as bad publicity": - Is that a good way to get cheap "influencers"? - Are there companies helping you measuring the potential "outreach" of your customers in case you piss them off?
• tardis_thad 4y ago
  Around 12:00 UTC today ban has been lifted for my account thanks to @jgrahamc - thanks!
  • MrGilbert 4y ago
    So HN to the rescue again. It's unfortunate (although the outcome is great for you!) that you have to go through the social media amplifier first.
    • causi 4y ago
      Personally I maintain my opinion that problems getting fixed by HN are a bigger red flag than problems not getting fixed at all. The HN reader Upper Management Person either thinks putting out fires before they become higher profile failures is a cheaper way of avoiding bad press than instituting actual good policies with regards to not fucking over their customers, or they want to implement those policies but are not competent to do so. "Send me your details and I'll fix it" = incompetent or asshole "Don't send me your details, I've fixed the problem for you and everyone else with the same issue" = green flag
      • hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
        Well OP chose to use Cloudfare and stay on it. It's his choice.
      • negidius 4y ago
        They may need the user's details to look into it and determine if it's an actual issue. When they have done that, it makes sense to fix it for that user at the same time. They should definitely come back and tell us that they have fixed it and why it happened as soon as possible afterwards, but I would understand if it takes a few weeks given normal levels of corporate bureaucracy. That said, it's bad that this happened in the first place, and it makes me a little anxious about using Cloudflare's services.
      • maxgashkov 4y ago
        > "Don't send me your details, I've fixed the problem for you and everyone else with the same issue" = green flag While I agree with the sentiment, fixing it in this way for any org of the CF-like scale will take days or weeks (because of peer reviews, compliance etc.). Fixing it fast by adding exception in some control panel is probably fine. What's alarming is that the escalation process didn't really change for all the time I'm using Cloudflare as a customer (8 yrs now?) and watching jgrahamc's involvement. The fact he has a bat signal trained on the HN is a major red flag.
• rafaelturk 4y ago
  Cloudflare pricing is crazy rabbit hole. What are the triggers the need to migrate to Cloudflare enterprise? moreover is possible to just be pay-per use?
• RektBoy 4y ago
  Can someone explain to me why anyone would pay for this SaaS, and instead just use an api from all markets?
  • 2kan 4y ago
    APIs from Exchanges return the current state of the market, and this SaaS captures and stores this market data. Imagine you want to enter a new market or instrument/symbol for which you never recorded market data yourself. You can buy historical data from this SaaS to train your models and backtest your strategy.
• runako 4y ago
  Glad to hear this got resolved. Heads-up that your name may be infringing on a US trademark held by the BBC.
  • supermatt 4y ago
    Trademarks are for specific categories of goods/services. The trademark is for: - Audiovisual media - Books - Clothing - Toys - Entertainment events
    • runako 4y ago
      The USPTO record for this trademark includes several more categories: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:lqn7wy.2.2 https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:lq... In particular, if I ran this business, I would be concerned that I was infringing on this part of the trademark: "( computer software for use in downloading audio, video, still and moving images and data in compressed and uncompressed form from a computer or communication network; )) [ computer software for use in database management; downloadable electronic publications, namely, magazines, books, newsletters, pamphlets, printed guides, catalogues, manuals and programs featuring entertainment, instruction, education, sport and news; ] " That said, IANAL and specifically IANAIPL so as I said just a heads-up.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • supermatt 4y ago
        Its for the media. i.e. it would need to be a downloadable piece of software that you run. SaaS is a different category entirely. Also, regardless of trademark registration, its legally only trademark infringement if it is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services. I doubt anyone is going to confuse a fictional time-ship (or related paraphernalia) with a SaaS providing crypto pricing (or whatever it is they do), or believe that they are made by the same organization. But I suppose people do litigate this stuff (or threaten to...), regardless of the spirit and letter of the law.
• majestic5762 4y ago
  I stopped paying for cloudflare after their support team was unable to debug why one of my rewrite conditions wasn't working. I provided them full details like for kindergarden, but they replied after days saying it's working on their end, lol. I deeply respect the cloudflare tech and the dev team, but support sucks and i don't trust cloudflare anymore. I won't pay even a single cent, even if they would have stellar support from now on. After reading all these cloudflare stories lately, and knowing how they treated me, i don't care about them anymore. Someone should write a "you probably dont need cloudflare" article. I'm disgusted by these kind of companies that grow large and they stop caring for the people who were there with them from day 1.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    just make your own CDN by installing an old raspberry pi on the network of every house you visit. Simple!
• mmahut 4y ago
  Was your account disabled including the DNS?
• _vufv 4y ago
  OP, you have garnered a lot of sympathy by the HN community which I believe in part contributed to your problem being resolved. I think it would be fair to provide more info about what the issue was in the end. It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience with Company X" and then be like "k, thx @jgrahamc, bye" when your complaint gets resolved due to the attention it received. There are so many questions this leaves unanswered: - Was this a one-off error in Cloudflare's processes? (These things happen on a big enough scale.) - Were you violating a specific clause of Cloudflare's T&C? How clear was the clause? What did you do to fix this? - Was the issue that Cloudflare estimated that you're not paying enough given the bandwidth you're consuming? Did you end up signing up for the Enterprise plan? Transparency would benefit both Cloudflare (in not making people unnecessarily apprehensive about becoming/remaining a customer) and you (in demonstrating that you're handling this issue in a professional and responsible manner).
  • runnerup 4y ago
    Would be nice if any parties which end up “using” HN to solve their customer service issues were somehow obligated to provide the community with a candid postmortem. That would be the right way to give back for customers using us as an amplifier and for corporations relying on us to be a shibboleth (a prefilter so providers know that this is a true issue unsolvable through existing support channels they have established for customers). Sharing these learnings with other potential founders would also be in line with the raison d’etre of HN. It would provide other founders with lessons they can takeaway and apply to their future startups to maybe do a few of these things right the first time around. For both sides, HN is “picking up slack” in the system and it would be right to support the community with candid postmortems.
  • dezb 4y ago
    oh it is 100% entirely OK to share that you got screwed by a company .. this crap happens all the time.. companies like this get away with ZERO shits give about customer support all the time.. it is insane..
    • lolinder 4y ago
• rexreed 4y ago
  From an earlier comment I made regarding Stripe shutting merchants down, and those merchants resorting to posting on HN and getting someone on HN to advocate for them to resolve their problem [0]: "The main issue is not that [COMPANY] is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but that customers feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're small and powerless, you feel that you have no control, and that your issues will go unanswered. What can the average, powerless customer who doesn't have the weight of social media, HN, @dang, or others on their side do when their hard-earned money or business is being held, locked, or otherwise prevented, and when the cause is not fraudulent, or if the customer is unaware of that activity? The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control. It's this feeling of powerlessness that's the issue, regardless of whether or not [COMPANY] is in its rights or doing what it feels is in its and its customers best interests. What can you do to help empower the powerless customers when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the customer and provide some quick and direct way for the customer to feel empowered?" Having to resort to HN to get major problems resolved that are major customer service and potential legal / liability issues causes me a lot of stress when I realize that I have don't have nearly the same sort of power or influence as some of the others here do on HN. I worry that my complaints would simply go ignored. @jgrahamc would love you to comment on what we can do to avoid people having to resort to HN for a solution to these problems, which favors the well-connected and squeaky wheels and disfavors everyone else. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274456
  • KennyBlanken 4y ago
    > What can you do to help empower the powerless customers when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the customer and provide some quick and direct way for the customer to feel empowered?" Legislation and regulation. Mill owners used to send little kids into running machines and they'd get shredded. Now we have child labor laws where under a certain age someone isn't allowed to operate most powered equipment. Mill owners used to not pay people for their wages. Now we have laws with civil and criminal repercussions if you don't pay someone timely and in full. The phone and electric companies have to follow a bunch of regulations around shutting off your service, because of the consequences. Companies should not be able to say "and if we fail, lol whatevs, fuck off." If you are providing a service, and someone depends on it to run for their business, then you should be responsible if you fail to provide service. Cost of doing business.
• matvp 4y ago
  While I agree HN shouldn't be used as a way to get direct customer support, I don't think it's fair to grab and point our pitchforks to @jgrahamc over a one sided story. There's not nearly enough information from both sides to create fair judgement (these things happen, unfortunately, at larger scale with automated processes). What matters is the afterthought and actions taken of what's going to prevent a similar situation in the future (which I'd love to read from both OP and @jgrahamc if possible). HN is my go to stop for well formulated opinions written by people way smarter than me and I think we dropped the ball here, HN can do better. That said, happy that your issue got resolved OP and goodluck with your project!
• byteofbits 4y ago
  The comments here have mainly focused on the issue of instant suspension - which is obviously deeply concerning - but I also feel like there is a huge issue at Cloudflare regarding their Enterprise pricing model. Cloudflare's sales team and Enterprise pricing model are one of the least effective sales organisations I have encountered in this space. Given the technical nature of their product, it's extremely hard to explain even basic uses of the tool and things like Workers are near impossible to discuss with them. I was really unsurprised to see that OP had a failed Enterprise negotiation with them as I have had the exact same conversation at three different companies now and can imagine perfectly what you were told. The current offerings of Enterprise and Enterprise Lite simply do not map to the reality of how people use the tool and scale businesses on top of it. I think in part due to Cloudflare's history essentially selling bandwidth and caching, the model is fixated on high binary traffic workloads and simply cannot comprehend the SaaS service model that runs on it and tools like Workers. This is mostly a rant and hopefully a small +1 signal that this area needs major improvement - but I would also love to hear if anyone else has had interactions with Cloudflare Enterprise and how they found that process? (Disclaimer: I'm a massive fan of Cloudflare, a user of their products and hold their stock)
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    I'm also a massive fan of Cloudflare in general, love their Workers and related products, just that one aspect of account suspension without warning could be improved a little bit :)
  • bob1029 4y ago
    > Cloudflare's sales team and Enterprise pricing model are one of the least effective sales organisations I have encountered in this space. I have seen this everywhere. Any large software company seems to operate with 2 completely different heads when it comes to technical sales support. The "best" experience I've had was with GitHub Enterprise sales, but mostly because they just gave me access to the docs/binaries without much frustration. If I had a bunch of questions about the technology vs cost vs how we actually want use their product, it would have been a substantial nightmare.
• manv1 4y ago
  Just imagine how many people that this happens to who don't know enough to post online on a forum that lots of people read. For the CloudFlare people here, this is an upsell opportunity that's being missed. The whole point of the cheap plan is to hook people so they move up. But if you cut them off you can't move them up, duh. You need to rework the sales pipeline for this scenario, obviously.
• Longlius 4y ago
  Cloudflare has gotten incredibly bad lately. If you don't want to offer your services to someone that's fine but you should at least do the bare minimum and reach out before completely terminating a vital piece of infrastructure they rely on.
• octacat 4y ago
  Oh my, 2.8 is "great". Time to reread the service terms. And it is in the times of API-s (and 20 years since ajax). Otherwise, this means that we can use workers for some stuff but need to use another provider for other stuff. Complexity overload, would rather use one provider, unless there are some great savings to move stuff to workers (that could cover the development complexity).
• zapt02 4y ago
  > Small SaaS > 4 billions requests & 1PB of data per month Pick one!
  • Alifatisk 4y ago
    > 4 Billion requests > 1 PB of data That’s not small for me but might be small to OP relatively speaking.
  • tardis_thad 4y ago
    Small in a sense it's only me running it and relatively low customers number (~400). So in that sense small applies?
• mathattack 4y ago
  My experience with the Cloudflare sales team is they were woefully disconnected from any ability to make good on their promises, and that it didn’t matter to them at all. It was a strange narcissism -bit wasn’t that they were deliberately lying, it was as if the notion of truth and lies didn’t matter. That if they kept blabbering assumed that they’d get the sale. In general you can’t trust salespeople and need to get everything in writing. Cloudflare is a prime example of why. And I’d add in my case because we were keeping track of their promises, we caught them before the sales process completed. It cost them seven figures a year. But maybe it doesn’t matter - their sales approach still has them worth $20 billion.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    20 billion in exchange for control of 10% of global traffic and 30% of US traffic seems awful low.
    • mathattack 4y ago
      Imagine their size and market cap if people could trust their Sales organization.
• moneywoes 4y ago
  Wow very interesting product, what’s your GTM strategy
• webstrand 4y ago
  I've been interested in using Cloudflare Workers as the backend for an application. I don't care about caching or anything like that, but, can I serve exclusively non-html content from my Cloudflare Workers? Or is that a violation of their ToS? I would have never honestly considered serving _html_ from a Worker. I hope we can get an extremely clear statement from Cloudflare on what their policy is.
  • kentonv 4y ago
    You can serve non-HTML content from Workers. This is explicitly called out in the supplemental terms for the Developer Platform here: https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/ (I'm the lead engineer on Workers. I don't know what happened to OP, though; I'm not personally looped into that conversation.)
    • Dylan16807 4y ago
      Another comment says "From what I understood is that it requires a manual over-ride on R2/ Workers because the thing that checks for the 2.8 TOS violation is not able to see the difference between Workers/ R2 and the standard CDN service. If you go to the R2 Discord channel you see this happening every other week" Is that at all plausible?
    • mkl 4y ago
      Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think that's explicit at all (I've tried to understand this before). The only mentions of HTML are in "(iv) Workers KV, Durable Objects, and R2, storage offerings used to serve HTML and non-HTML content": Workers KV, not Workers. Meanwhile, section "2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content" of the terms says: "The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services." Serving a "disproportionate percentage of [...] non-HTML content is prohibited". To my understanding, that means that web APIs are allowed, but only if they don't return a disproportionate percentage of non-HTML, since the supplemental terms don't expressly allow it (e.g. no JSON-only APIs).
• pier25 4y ago
  This is very worrying. I use Workers to cache and stream audio. I was under the impression Workers were under a different TOS since the business model is totally different and paid per req.
• phaedrix 4y ago
  Cloudflare support is complete garbage. We upgraded to Enterprise, and had some issues because CF's documentation was not clear (literally a blog post), and their support took many days to even respond and then their response made it clear they hadn't even read the ticket. I'd move everything into AWS in a second if moving DNS wasn't such a pain. Also am forced to use the global api token because constantly get rate limited using permission-scoped api tokens -- this is from a simple Terraform plan (first thing in the morning) and after them increasing my rate limit to the max.
• somecompanyguy 4y ago
  good to know. will make sure to never give cloudflare a dime.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  "The large print giveth, the small print taketh away" has never been more true than with Cloudflare. None of Cloudflare's marketing or technical documentation makes any explicit reference to "permitted usages" for Cloudflare services such as R2 and Workers. This page for example means one thing without any reference to permitted usages and would mean something entirely different if the permitted usages were promoted with the same level of visibility as the benefits. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ Nothing here tells me I cannot write my own video serving code with Workers: https://workers.cloudflare.com/ https://workers.cloudflare.com/ You might even believe "whatever you need" from this paragraph from the above link: "Static assets with dynamic power. Say goodbye to build steps which pre-generate thousands of assets in advance. Harness the unrivaled raw power of the edge to generate images, SVGs, PDFs, whatever you need, on the fly, and deliver them to users as quickly as a static asset." This developer documentation would takes on an entirely new meaning if a link to "acceptable uses" was prominent at the top of each page (not fine print). https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-access/workers-api/workers-api-reference/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-access/workers-api... https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/examples/demo-worker/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/examples/demo-worker/ Have built an entire application around assuming there were no such limitations I now need to rebuild elsewhere. Humph. I now no longer even understand what "no egress fees" means - in a way that's worse than the big cloud providers where at least you know they are charging you 9 cents per gigabyte.
• readonthegoapp 4y ago
  i feel like this is a repeating theme, and i've seen it at a company i was at. in my view, the root of the problem is that companies don't have usage limits in place. they often have 'sort of' usage limits in place -- that is, they don't actually have metrics for their customers' usage, and that leads to these situations. and these situations are insane resource hogs -- teams of people spending days to try to figure out whether some customer should be bumped up to the next level. it doesn't happen, then the customer gets cut off. pretty messed up for Cloudflare to try and destroy a company like that for no reason. we get these wishy-washy usage/support/sales situations with a lot of ambigous back and forth, and BIGCOMPANY trying to kill _littlecompany_, etc. set usage limits, when they're surpassed, move the customer to the higher tier, done. plenty more you can do around the edges, like grace periods, etc. etc., but i feel like this is amateur hour and cruel indifference - in this case, from Cloudflare -- and not the first time we've seen indifference from them, and other BIGTECH companies.
• exelib 4y ago
  Oh, it looks like Cloudflare is no longer a good choice. We had very similar experience with Ionic. We tried to put our money in, but no one was interested.
• bacchusracine 4y ago
  I see accounts like this all the time, I run into the endless loop of cloudflare refusing to serve me a webpage all the time. Somehow clicking the captcha seems to do nothing. I don't know if it's my insistence on using my browser of choice, or my regular clearing of cookies or what have you while trying to keep my laptop secure. All I know is to me Cloudflare seems to be a gatekeeper of the worst kind, the kind that blocks me from accessing the content I seek to load. And the idea that it somehow is protecting the web seems more and more ludicrous each tale like this I read. With each page that is delayed in a loop before finally letting me read it, I become more and more convinced at the sheer uselessness of it. Why does anyone bother with it in the first place when it clearly doesn't actually work and worse can be turned against you at any time?
• tardis_thad 4y ago
  If anyone interested here’s what happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696763 I was not aware about the spike in bandwidth, will also try to handle such cases on my side better.
• KomoD 4y ago
  Cloudflare has published a blog post about this event: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-erroneously-throttled-a-customers-web-traffic/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-erroneously-throt...
  • mrinc 4y ago
    At least they transparently and openly admitted they were at fault as well as how they're going to stop it from occuring in the future. Overall glad it was resolved
• sgarg26 4y ago
  OP, any updates?