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I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause

I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause violation (non html content) and suggested to contact with sales which I immediately did. Sales over the phone (was fastest) told me that it's good I contacted as otherwise in 24hours my account would be fully banned(whatever it means) and that they will prepare me an offer in 15 minutes, but it was taking longer (no response after an hour or so) and in the meanwhile I wrote Twitter and HN post which CTO of Cloudflare noticed and then after a while I've got another phone call from sales that I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account as it was approved now by CTO which I did and that solved the issue at least for now - and that's it - no further info what the issue was, still waiting on Enterprise plan quote for me.

godzillabrennus 4y ago
Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription… The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I've had only limited interaction with their sales people, but find it interesting they weren't on-the-ball trying to sell an account that valuable, either—we were more toward the bottom end of their enterprise range, so I'd just assumed we were too small-potatoes for them, but those were by far the least-hungry sales people I've ever interacted with. It was like I was bothering them. LOL. Also some of them seemed to know very little about their offerings, market segments, et c., which was weird. [EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.
  - dismantlethesun 4y ago
    I agree. I contacted Cloudflare sales for a small order of just a 100k or so per year, and they totally ghosted me after my first round of questions. No quote, no contact, nada. I gave up and went to Fastly. You may say my order was too tiny but even Akamai gave a response; they just didn’t have any turn key product that suited my needs.
    - tachim 4y ago
      exact same experience here.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Yeah, CloudFlare was unique among the companies in this space that we contacted. The others' sales folks all gave way more shits, even at fairly big companies where I'm certain we wouldn't be a notably-large account. They were also by far the least-interested in tailoring their plan. "Oh you don't want to pay for this giant pile of stuff you don't need? Hm. Well. Too bad." Seemed like they wanted all-or-nothing, for enterprise plans, which leaves a big gap in their offerings between the top self-serve and the bottom end of enterprise—seems like a pretty major gap in their funnel, letting all those accounts just leave if they exceed self-serve but can't justify the very-expensive minimum enterprise plan, but I guess it's working for them?
    - nolok 4y ago
      Wait they're less reponsive than Akamai ? I ran away from Akamai because of their sales people and how they apparently embedded their dark soul straight into the user interface they give you to use, and by use I mean summon an akamai billing person from the depths because you're not allowed to do anything without them. I know they're doing good but Cloudflare must be even more successful than I thought if they can afford that level of ineptitude at sales level
      - rgbrenner 4y ago
        Akamai is growing at 7% per year vs 40% per year for Cloudflare. Akamai is still 5x the size of Cloudflare but their growth rate is a lot more manageable than 40%.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.
  - hapidjus 4y ago
    BDR?
    - CallMeJim 4y ago
      Business Development Representative.
      - tobyjsullivan 4y ago
        Impressively, the expansion conveys about as much information as the acronym. "Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.
        notahacker 4y ago
        In most companies it's more accurately translated as "lead generator" or "sender of spam emails and LinkedIn messages"
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    > Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? They have someone on the hook with customers hounding them to get their system back online and it isn’t worth spending a few minutes to quote a guaranteed sale? Something about a bird in the hand comes to mind…
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Why wouldn't you do both? And if your sales department is maxed out by chasing the big contracts so much so that they don't have time to onboard someone spending 50k a year, get more sales people.
nightpool 4y ago
"most likely due to" 2.8 clause violation? So Support wasn't able to say conclusively why your account was restricted?
- ajdude 4y ago
  Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess. I don't know if this is the case for CF but it seems to be for other businesses.
  - atmosx 4y ago
    So the takeaway is “use cloudflare and pray to the ML Gods that things won’t go south?”. Doesn’t sound reassuring. Funnily, in all fields were AI and ML has been involved the QoS has degraded. Like these technologies used to be a marketing trick (we use AI) these days poor QoS is reason to find corps that do not.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess. I don't think it's usually that they don't know what's going on, but that they don't want to tell you, because they think that's giving away too many details. I've been flagged in many systems as I move around in the world quite a bit, so sometimes I use a credit card acquired in one country in another, and a couple of days later using it on the other side of the planet, which triggers their anti-fraud systems. Then I write to them and they reply something like "Unfortunately you cannot continue to use our services as your account been flagged as potential fraudulent use. We cannot give you any details because then it'll be easier for fraudulent actors to work around it, so I'm sorry we cannot tell you anything else. Bye."
    - d1sxeyes 4y ago
      Normally banks are restricted from explaining why your account was locked. It’s not necessarily their fault.
irq-1 4y ago
> I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account That is a very broken process! Ask the user to change the ticket, so they can do something that they already know is approved? Sales department sounds like a disaster.
- dylan604 4y ago
  doesnt make support out any better though. if i can later just update the ticket myself with "cause the CTO says so" seems sus to say the least
pffft8888 4y ago
Wow. I was just about to code a key part of our startup's platform using workers and durable objects. I had zero idea that workers are intended for html output and that if they were used for JSON-RPC they would ban us if we are too successful. Crazy. The whole point of the service is free egress. What a joke. Pass. Will look into Fastly.
- last_responder 4y ago
  Im on the fence about whether this is accurate. There was an addendum posted somewhere in this thread that clarifies that non-html is just fine. In reality Im in the same exact position you are and maybe I just want to believe this is something other than that. I dont see why they would care about the content. There has to be something else to this story. I didn't deploy yet and this has me scared enough to get me thinking about an alternative. Time to spin up a new linode instance I guess.
  - rgbrenner 4y ago
    Sure it’s all fine until an ai or person bans your account for it. It’s cool to talk about what the contract says until you try that and find out their practices implement something else. Unless you plan to sue Cloudflare, the implementation is more important than the contract.

godzillabrennus 4y ago

Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription… The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I've had only limited interaction with their sales people, but find it interesting they weren't on-the-ball trying to sell an account that valuable, either—we were more toward the bottom end of their enterprise range, so I'd just assumed we were too small-potatoes for them, but those were by far the least-hungry sales people I've ever interacted with. It was like I was bothering them. LOL. Also some of them seemed to know very little about their offerings, market segments, et c., which was weird. [EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.
- dismantlethesun 4y ago
  I agree. I contacted Cloudflare sales for a small order of just a 100k or so per year, and they totally ghosted me after my first round of questions. No quote, no contact, nada. I gave up and went to Fastly. You may say my order was too tiny but even Akamai gave a response; they just didn’t have any turn key product that suited my needs.
  - tachim 4y ago
    exact same experience here.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Yeah, CloudFlare was unique among the companies in this space that we contacted. The others' sales folks all gave way more shits, even at fairly big companies where I'm certain we wouldn't be a notably-large account. They were also by far the least-interested in tailoring their plan. "Oh you don't want to pay for this giant pile of stuff you don't need? Hm. Well. Too bad." Seemed like they wanted all-or-nothing, for enterprise plans, which leaves a big gap in their offerings between the top self-serve and the bottom end of enterprise—seems like a pretty major gap in their funnel, letting all those accounts just leave if they exceed self-serve but can't justify the very-expensive minimum enterprise plan, but I guess it's working for them?
  - nolok 4y ago
    Wait they're less reponsive than Akamai ? I ran away from Akamai because of their sales people and how they apparently embedded their dark soul straight into the user interface they give you to use, and by use I mean summon an akamai billing person from the depths because you're not allowed to do anything without them. I know they're doing good but Cloudflare must be even more successful than I thought if they can afford that level of ineptitude at sales level
    - rgbrenner 4y ago
      Akamai is growing at 7% per year vs 40% per year for Cloudflare. Akamai is still 5x the size of Cloudflare but their growth rate is a lot more manageable than 40%.
bastardoperator 4y ago
Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.
- hapidjus 4y ago
  BDR?
  - CallMeJim 4y ago
    Business Development Representative.
    - tobyjsullivan 4y ago
      Impressively, the expansion conveys about as much information as the acronym. "Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        In most companies it's more accurately translated as "lead generator" or "sender of spam emails and LinkedIn messages"
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? They have someone on the hook with customers hounding them to get their system back online and it isn’t worth spending a few minutes to quote a guaranteed sale? Something about a bird in the hand comes to mind…
- luckylion 4y ago
  Why wouldn't you do both? And if your sales department is maxed out by chasing the big contracts so much so that they don't have time to onboard someone spending 50k a year, get more sales people.

nightpool 4y ago

"most likely due to" 2.8 clause violation? So Support wasn't able to say conclusively why your account was restricted?

ajdude 4y ago
Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess. I don't know if this is the case for CF but it seems to be for other businesses.
- atmosx 4y ago
  So the takeaway is “use cloudflare and pray to the ML Gods that things won’t go south?”. Doesn’t sound reassuring. Funnily, in all fields were AI and ML has been involved the QoS has degraded. Like these technologies used to be a marketing trick (we use AI) these days poor QoS is reason to find corps that do not.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess. I don't think it's usually that they don't know what's going on, but that they don't want to tell you, because they think that's giving away too many details. I've been flagged in many systems as I move around in the world quite a bit, so sometimes I use a credit card acquired in one country in another, and a couple of days later using it on the other side of the planet, which triggers their anti-fraud systems. Then I write to them and they reply something like "Unfortunately you cannot continue to use our services as your account been flagged as potential fraudulent use. We cannot give you any details because then it'll be easier for fraudulent actors to work around it, so I'm sorry we cannot tell you anything else. Bye."
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    Normally banks are restricted from explaining why your account was locked. It’s not necessarily their fault.

irq-1 4y ago

> I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account That is a very broken process! Ask the user to change the ticket, so they can do something that they already know is approved? Sales department sounds like a disaster.

dylan604 4y ago
doesnt make support out any better though. if i can later just update the ticket myself with "cause the CTO says so" seems sus to say the least

pffft8888 4y ago

Wow. I was just about to code a key part of our startup's platform using workers and durable objects. I had zero idea that workers are intended for html output and that if they were used for JSON-RPC they would ban us if we are too successful. Crazy. The whole point of the service is free egress. What a joke. Pass. Will look into Fastly.

last_responder 4y ago
Im on the fence about whether this is accurate. There was an addendum posted somewhere in this thread that clarifies that non-html is just fine. In reality Im in the same exact position you are and maybe I just want to believe this is something other than that. I dont see why they would care about the content. There has to be something else to this story. I didn't deploy yet and this has me scared enough to get me thinking about an alternative. Time to spin up a new linode instance I guess.
- rgbrenner 4y ago
  Sure it’s all fine until an ai or person bans your account for it. It’s cool to talk about what the contract says until you try that and find out their practices implement something else. Unless you plan to sue Cloudflare, the implementation is more important than the contract.