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

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

#201

Post by bob1029 »

byteofbits wrote: post #187

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 e…

> 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.

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

#202

Post by iamacyborg »

mdip wrote: post #197
iamacyborg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that stuff needs to be raised at all is the problem. Clearly something has gone wrong if customers get treated this way.

Before piling on too much more, here ... ... Cloudflare has a lot of customers[0]. They have to balance the cost of providing (a lot of) human support against the cost they can reasonably charge for their products. It's a balancing act, and one that has worked out well for me, personally. It sounds like this issue is happening related to R2, which is quite new. You're not likely to see a post hit the front page with…

I wouldn't say it indicates there's a mess, just that there's clearly some sort of broken process somewhere.

1. The customer is deplatformed without any notice

2. Customer support is failing to act on a false positive in a prompt manner and the customer has no recourse but to kick up a stink publicly

Both of those are fixable problems and I agree that it's generally a positive to see a company's CTO act in so public a manner. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to improve things from an internal process perspective though.

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

#203

Post by yamtaddle »

vishalchandra wrote: post #49

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, le…

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.

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

#204

Post by godzillabrennus »

tardis_thad wrote: post #189
_vufv wrote: post #169

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 l…

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 prepa…

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.

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

#205

Post by manv1 »

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.

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

#207

Post by nightpool »

lolinder wrote: post #196
dezb wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Not that this is true in this case, but a large number of HN support thread creators are very cagey about the nature of their business. I suspect a lot of the time they know they broke the ToS and are hoping that HN will get the pitchforks out to help them get their way regardless. Again, that doesn't seem to apply here, but I've stopped assuming that the existence of an HN support thread by itself shows malfeasance…

Why "doesn't it seem to apply" that a blockchain scraping/data aggregation firm would be cagey about the nature of their business? I can't think of shakier grounds for a business to rest on, in two different dimensions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639879). (Reliance on customers not being sophisticated enough to set up API integrations themselves, reliance on blockchain as a failing segment of the market). Obviously it's not necessarily against Cloudflare's TOS to be a precarious business, but generally when a business' foundation is sketchy than it's more likely that more of the interactions they have with others are going to be sketchy.

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

#208

Post by nightpool »

tardis_thad wrote: post #189
_vufv wrote: post #169

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 l…

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 prepa…

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

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

#209

Post by octacat »

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).
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