TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

Always call out Cloudflare for their bullshit. For those working for companies in devops, share this with your teams…

  • FizzyOrange
    32·
    6 months ago

    try to play hard ball by mentioning that they’re already talking to other providers

    It’s not “playing hard ball” to mention that you are look at other options. Jesus. As the author said, of course they would be. Wouldn’t you if you were facing a 40x price increase?

    To use a service tier that they’ve clearly exceeded for quite some time and then act surprised when they’re asked to upgrade.

    We must have read totally different posts.

    • JiveTurkey@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 months ago

      Now admittedly, $250 is probably fairly low for the amount of traffic we were pushing through Cloudflare. We mainly use CF for the CDN (caching all our static content) and DDOS protection, for which it works pretty well. It’s easy to use and you don’t usually have to think about it much.

      Nope. Same article. You’re crazy if you think you can average 7mil visitors a month and stick to the $250/mo plan. It blows my mind that a casino of all things is mad about that and we’ve got people like you so desperate to shit on cloudflare that you can’t see how ridiculous that is.

      • Phoeniqz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Wasn’t the “Business” plan advertised as “unlimited”? Also the problem was a totally different one. They were pressured into upgrading to the “Enterprise” plan without being given any reason. I would be on CF’s side if they just said: “With your current plan you are violating TOS. Here’s what you did wrong: Lists ToS violations The features you need in order to fix this are only included in the Enterprise plan, so please upgrade or we have to terminate your services, we give you 1 week”

      • FizzyOrange
        32·
        6 months ago

        You’ve misunderstood the issues completely. They had no issue with paying more. The issue is with the extortion of demanding they pay for 12 months up front, the 40x increase (7 million visits a month is 3 visits per second on average; not huge - definitely doesn’t cost $10k/month), the terrible communication, and the retaliatory shutdown of their account. If you can’t see the issue with any of those I’m not sure what’s wrong with you.

        Consider how Cloudflare should have handled this:

        1. Instead of connecting them to sales repeatedly, connect them to a technical team who could explain the actual issue.
        2. Let them pay monthly (honestly based on the emails from them it sounds like there actually is a monthly option; they just were trying to strongarm them into paying for a year).
        3. Have less insane pricing.
        4. Give them proper warning before shutting their site down. Not “your site may be closed”, but “we will close your site on XXX”.

        Cloudflare are the clear villains here, assuming none of this is an outright fabrication, which seems unlikely based on the similar experiences of other people. You desperately grasping at the fact that its a casino to swing the moral balance is hilarious. Why do you want to defend Cloudflare so much? Do you have shares in them or something? (Pretty sure I do.)