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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

#211

Post by mathattack »

My experience with the Cloudflare sales team is they were woefully disconnected from any ability to make good on their promises, and that it didn’t matter to them at all. It was a strange narcissism -bit wasn’t that they were deliberately lying, it was as if the notion of truth and lies didn’t matter. That if they kept blabbering assumed that they’d get the sale.

In general you can’t trust salespeople and need to get everything in writing. Cloudflare is a prime example of why.

And I’d add in my case because we were keeping track of their promises, we caught them before the sales process completed. It cost them seven figures a year. But maybe it doesn’t matter - their sales approach still has them worth $20 billion.

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

#212

Post by pciexpgpu »

jgrahamc wrote: post #132
tebbers wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear John, I absolutely love and admire Cloudflare’s services as a customer (and recent investor), but please please get stuff like this sorted as it will absolute ruin Cloudflare’s reputation in the long run. I beg you!

Believe me that this is what I'm doing. I'm really disappointed this customer got into this state and I'm working internally to figure out why it did.

Worrying part is the account could get banned. Could you reply here if that’s true? Would that take down dns/registrar etc functionality? Google does this and people would move to cloudflare thinking you wouldn’t do this account ban but nowhere is it stated.

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

#213

Post by runako »

supermatt wrote: post #190
runako wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USPTO record for this trademark includes several more categories: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4803:lq... In particular, if I ran this business, I would be concerned that I was infringing on this part of the trademark: "( computer software for use in downloading audio, video, still and moving images and data in compressed and uncompressed form from a computer or communication network; )) […

Its for the media. i.e. it would need to be a downloadable piece of software that you run. SaaS is a different category entirely. Also, regardless of trademark registration, its legally only trademark infringement if it is likely to cause confusion, deception, or mistake about the source of the goods and/or services. I doubt anyone is going to confuse a fictional time-ship (or related paraphernalia) with a SaaS provi…

As you sound like an IP lawyer, I will defer. But would still suggest the OP get a written opinion for his specific case from his own IP lawyer.

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

#215

Post by yamtaddle »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #86
Dowwie wrote: post #81

4 Billion requests per month involving 1 Petabyte of traffic doesn't seem like a "small SAAS", at least packet-wise. If its small revenue-wise, addressing that is a business concern as important as having your platform throttled for using the cheapo economy edition tier of whatever you've signed up for with Cloudflare. Did Cloudflare issue any formal communication with you warning about usage and how it violates cont…

Sounds like OP has spoken with cloudflare previously about their usage/cloudflare services, likely looking to upgrade by the sounds of it but sales maybe gave the impression OP was ok on current level of service. > I would fully understand that I am required to upgrade, but why not sending me an email before shutting down my business completely? I even asked about such scenario on zoom meeting I had with their Sales…

> Sounds like OP has spoken with cloudflare previously about their usage/cloudflare services, likely looking to upgrade by the sounds of it but sales maybe gave the impression OP was ok on current level of service.

They've done this to me, too—I read the TOS and tech docs and plan details and ignored them, because according to their own stuff, they were wrong, and "first-tier sales guy said it" isn't a helpful recourse if you get told to leave (so, migration costs) or pay $$$$ because you're violating their documented permitted usage.

Hilariously, they also seemed really confused when I brought up a gaming use-case that they had an entire sales landing page for.

(Nb I actually like, use, and would recommend CloudFlare for some workloads and use-cases)

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

#216

Post by ndneighbor »

dezb wrote: post #183
_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…

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..

Unfortunately the norm in our industry, can't have "Cloud" margins without sacrificing something.

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

#217

Post by ajdude »

nightpool wrote: post #208
tardis_thad wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#219

Post by webstrand »

I've been interested in using Cloudflare Workers as the backend for an application. I don't care about caching or anything like that, but, can I serve exclusively non-html content from my Cloudflare Workers? Or is that a violation of their ToS?

I would have never honestly considered serving _html_ from a Worker. I hope we can get an extremely clear statement from Cloudflare on what their policy is.

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

#220

Post by yamtaddle »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #204
tardis_thad wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ok…

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.

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