Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
robindev.substack.com
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.

Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):

This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.

I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.

  • @[email protected]English
    29•7 months ago

    CloudFlare don’t need to subsidise an online casino with millions of subscribers, at everyone else’s expense. Sure CF are a bunch of gigglefucks but this time I think they made a good decision.

    • xxdEnglish
      54•7 months ago

      Unless the casino is doing something illegal, it’s really not their decision to make. If they don’t want to subsidize them, all they’d have to do is be transparent and fair in their pricing. They way CF handled it instead just seems unprofessional and deceitful.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•7 months ago

        Exactly right.

        If they are somehow losing money routing traffic then their pricing is fundamentally wrong, which is just as big of a black eye for cloudflare.

      • @[email protected]English
        27•7 months ago

        $0 is better than having a customer whose costs exceed their revenue; it looks like the bad press is being managed; and also fuck online casinos very much.

        • @[email protected]English
          35•7 months ago

          Just because you don’t like online casinos, doesn’t mean cloudflare didn’t completely fuck this up. They could have negotiated reasonable terms to increase their revenue on this account instead of going the route of stonewalling and extortion.

          So not only did they lose this customer, but this bad press will ensure a lot of others never sign up with them, potentially costing them millions in foregone sales.

          Yeah this was a massive boondoggle…

          • tedu
            17•7 months ago

            Are these millions of potential customers in the room with us?

            • @[email protected]English
              8•7 months ago

              If they’re charging $120,000 per client, it only takes 17 potential lost customers to constitute “millions.” It’s realistic that at least 17 companies might be put-off with the way this was handled.

    • @[email protected]English
      25•7 months ago

      I read the post and it doesn’t sound abusive at all

      Plus: cloudflare kept putting them in touch with the sales department. Not legal. Not technical support

      It’s just shit customer service, even if the customer is making a ton of money compared to your fees. Should a casino pay more for other services, too, just because they" don’t need a subsidy"?

      • @[email protected]English
        15•7 months ago

        As strange as this may sound… if you’re having serious technical problems, it’s the sales team you want to talk to.

        Sales people have way more pull at tech companies than the engineering teams do. If your sales rep sounds an alarm, people listen. When tech support sounds an alarm, nobody bats an eye.

        In this particular situation, they should be reaching out to cloudflare’s legal team. But, with their own legal team.

        • ✺roguetrick✺English
          6•7 months ago

          Good luck with the lawsuit for breach of contract when you broke the contract. I’m sure the judge will be amused.

    • @[email protected]English
      24•7 months ago

      Subsidise how? They were using their existing plan as intended and even willing ditch the grey-area parts. If CF cannot afford to offer their plans as they are, they should change the offered plans, not hunt for easy prey.

      • @[email protected]English
        14•7 months ago

        Clearly CF were losing money on this account, so their other customers were subsidising.

        Ah fuck it, I’m clearly at the bottom of a dog pile here, and I don’t want to be friends with any of you, nor am I going to start thinking that an online casino deserves anything but contempt, so I’ll be off.

        • @[email protected]English
          12•7 months ago

          No no, you’re really not far off. Few, if any people here are advocating for CF to continue to provide the same services for the same price. It seems clear to most (including the author) that a price increase was justified. The problem we’re all having is how they went about it, agnostic of the client.

          (I don’t care who the client was and don’t care one way or the other about online casinos.)

    • @[email protected]English
      4•7 months ago

      It’s not the decision to ask more money, it’s how they made it and in violation of their own terms of service, also extortion, so yes they are dipshits.