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It's not really free. One day, you get a call from their sales team saying "you're straining our network". I kid you not. We were on a business plan and still g

• wiradikusuma 2y ago
  You should report that to them. Their CTO multiple times said this in HN.
• dubcanada 2y ago
  To be honest, sales people are sales people. Their job is to sell you on packages, and they will generally do anything to get you to upgrade. It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service. They asked you and gave you a "canned" reason. If you don't mind me asking you had a $200 a month plan, and changed to another provider. Did the plan price go up or down?
  • threatofrain 2y ago
    If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer. Except now there isn’t a clear formalization on how much you were expecting to pay or how much runway or patience CF has left for you.
    • maccard 2y ago
      > If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer. I've had a call from Cloudflare at my previous job, and it wasn't a "you're about to be fired" it was an attempted upsell.
  • nextaccountic 2y ago
    > It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service They routinely do exactly this
    • noname120 2y ago
      And it's not only threats, they actually enforce them. Here is an example, but there are many more: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
      • ycombinatrix 2y ago
        This org was getting Cloudflare owned IPs blocked left & right due to the gambling content. The fees are for sure ridiculous but i don't think Cloudflare was wholly unreasonable to request that the customer bring their own IP.
        • noname120 2y ago
          Is it written anywhere in their ToS that “gambling content” requires you to pay 120k$ or get booted out? If not, then it's not reasonable at all to give them a 24-hour notice and it definitely sounds like extortion. I don't buy the “was getting Cloudflare owned IPs blocked left & right” argument. Remember we are talking about a platform that still protects 4chan despite the internet raids, violence threats, celebrity hacking + photos leak, the buffalo shooting, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies_and_harassment_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies_and_harass...
          • nijave 2y ago
            Surely there are abuse and fair use provisions in their ToS/contract for shared resources like IPs. If they're in the xx percentile of customers causing IP blocks they'd enforce.
            • noname120 2y ago
  • bradgessler 2y ago
    Sales people work within the policies & frameworks set by a sales organizations whose goals and strategies are set by said organizations leadership team. This isn't a random sales person gone rouge—its a matter of how Cloudflare chooses to do business with and treat their customers. The problem with this approach for customers is that it makes there costs entirely unpredictable. What's the stop them from increasing prices from $2,000 on the enterprise plan to $20,000 on the enterprise plus plan?
    • Spivak 2y ago
      If you're not big enough to get an actual contract signed by your legal teams then nothing. That's just how it is, not unique to CF.
      • nijave 2y ago
        Sure but there's a huge difference between companies that load the call with sales people and sell to execs vs bringing solutions architects and sales/customer engineers on the call and actually explaining the product and its benefits and coming up with a customer tailored solution. We had a pretty positive experience with a Cloudflare contract last year but it sounds like Cloudflare is more the former than the latter.
    • nijave 2y ago
      Very true. I think it was Snowflake we worked with recently where the sales rep said they don't get commission (I assume they have other incentives). Aggressive commission structures, sales targets, and little oversights have visible impacts on how the sales team operate. Compare to cloud providers like AWS where you certainly get "reminded" constantly about all the integrated services and features but much less so harassed and threatened into closing deals.
• johntash 2y ago
  Did you move from cf to someone else, or are you still using them?
  • wahnfrieden 2y ago
    I like Bunny because it’s prepaid
• gruez 2y ago
  >I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay. You seem to be pretty cagey about what your usage actually was, and whether it was indeed "straining their network". Were you using more resources/bandwidth than a typical customer would? Most ToS contains clauses that allows the vendor to unilaterally cut customers off if they're an excessive burden, even if there aren't explicit quotas, or are explicitly "unlimited". ISPs don't let you saturate your 1Gbit connection 24 hours a day, even on "unlimited" plans, but I wouldn't call it a "scam" if they told you to upgrade to an enterprise plan.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • rovr138 2y ago
    straining is also ambiguous and disingenuous. if we believe the plan was $200 and the upgrade was to a $2,000 plan.. there's no way a $2,000 user would be "straining" Cloudflare's network. We spend more than that. If we are putting a strain on Cloudflare, they're not at the scale we think they're at.
    • gruez 2y ago
      Seems like you don't really have any issue with the underlying business decision (ie. pushing a high usage customer to a higher tier plan) and are only upset about the wording the salesperson used. All the points you've made applies to ISPs as well. Most neighborhoods are probably provisioned well enough that a single customer saturating their 1gbit connection isn't going to bring the network down to its knees, but that doesn't mean ISPs aren't justified in pushing such customers to a higher tier offering (eg. dedicated circuit).
      • BoorishBears 2y ago
        Why are you straining so hard and spending so many words to defend general scumminess. Invisible limits are an anti-pattern, simple as that.
• throitallaway 2y ago
  I'm not a fan of Cloudflare's enterprise pricing model. It seems like they'll charge you whatever they'd like to when renewal time comes around, and will play with the numbers to ensure you stay around whatever total they'd like to see. They charge for each protected domain, in addition to sane metrics like bandwidth utilization and number of requests. Charging thousands per protected domain per year is scummy. Maybe I'm just too used to AWS/GCloud/et al. pricing that actually bills me on utilization rather than arbitrary metrics.
• specialp 2y ago
  This is a growing pattern in hosting like Netlify and headless CMSs like Sanity. Their free model is "generous" and then if you go production and start to have overages you get billed exorbitantly for bandwidth and API requests. It is essentially a trap. Once you hit those limits you have very little negotiating power when you hit the "call us for pricing" level and you get outrageous quotes. It costs them very little to run these services so if they can net some minnows that become whales, that is almost pure profit.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • tootie 2y ago
    It's the double-edged sword of both free plans and "transparent pricing". If you just click "buy" and enter your CC info you're subject to their somewhat arbitrary terms of service. Service is cheap and reliable so you don't ask questions. But they can just boot you and there's very little recourse. It's why most big companies want a signed contract that's binding and comes with some kind of mandatory dispute resolution or penalties for non-compliance.
• deleted 2y ago
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• grapesodaaaaa 2y ago
  I actually recommend AWS because of this. Sure, it’s AWS with all the warts, but at least they bend over backwards to maintain compatibility (at least compared to GCP), and have sustainable billing practices. Free is free until it’s not. When Cloudflare becomes the new Akamai and needs profits, guess who will get squeezed. If you’ve built your app around their vendor specific stuff like Cloudflare functions, that can be bad news.
  • internetter 2y ago
    > If you’ve built your app around their vendor specific stuff like Cloudflare functions, that can be bad news. There's nothing that "special" about Cloudflare Workers, its mostly "just" a WinterCG runtime. Where you'd encounter problems is if you used the provided interfaces for other adjacent Cloudflare products, like R2, D1, KV, Queues, ect. So what you do is commit a hour of engineering time to make wrapper functions for these APIs. If you're feeling extra spicy, commit another hour of engineering time to make parallel implementations for another service provider. If you allow your tech stack to become deeply intertwined with a 3rd party service provider, thats on you.
    • grapesodaaaaa 2y ago
      Yeah, I guess that’s what I really meant. Also at face value, it may seem like “an hour of engineering time,” but I think cloud vendor lock in is real unless you try very hard to only use abstract constructs.
      • notyourwork 2y ago
        Agreed, I’m wondering where all these magical 1-hour efforts come from that decouple someone from a vendor. Let me just decouple from s3 real quick.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  Would you be comfortable sharing how many terabytes you were pushing over their network? Also, how much a similar contract costs with the competition. While I agree it’s scummy, you could argue you got $1800 worth of traffic for free for a while.
• danpalmer 2y ago
  We had a terrible sales experience with Cloudflare at my last place. They would not budge on the $200 a month quote, and we knew that was BS because the next closest quote we had was $3000 or something. Eventually, like the fourth try, we said, in writing, “just to be clear, for exactly $200, a month we will get XYZ bandwidth”, and of course they said “ohhh well actually maybe it’ll be $8000”. We had discussed our requirements, our scale, our product with the sales team multiple times but it was only when we wrote down something that we could potentially have used in court that they finally acknowledged their pricing was actually nearly two orders of magnitude higher.