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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#221

Post by atmosx »

ajdude wrote: post #217
nightpool wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

So the takeaway is “use cloudflare and pray to the ML Gods that things won’t go south?”. Doesn’t sound reassuring. Funnily, in all fields were AI and ML has been involved the QoS has degraded. Like these technologies used to be a marketing trick (we use AI) these days poor QoS is reason to find corps that do not.

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

#222

Post by b112 »

IanCal wrote: post #85
tardis_thad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like my account was restricted due to https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/supplemental-terms/#cloudfl ... 2.Cloudflare may, with or without notice to you and without liability of any kind, temporarily limit your storage and/or the number of requests you can make or receive using the Developer Platform for any reason (in its sole reasonable discretion), including without limitation, if processing such requests woul…

Unless you saw a huge spike I feel like not letting you know before is totally unacceptable. Also, while that's in the terms that's a generic get out clause I know they need but doesn't at all help you figure out what services are ok.

Unless you saw a huge spike I feel like not letting you know before is totally unacceptable

I agree... sort of? I mean, this is Cloudflare, right? It isn't as if a huge, legit traffic spike should tax their infra.

IMO, there should be zero shutdown for any long term client, for any reason, at all, ever, without an form of contact.

So weird to have stable uptimes, then support saying "we sorta think you were blocked because..."

So, even account info, with a valid "block" reason, isn't available to their own staff. EG, even their own staff aren't notified?!?

This is sales 101. Mega-simple stuff.

"Hi! You are doing bad thing X, and it needs to change, but we can fix that right now! Let me help you..."

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

#223

Post by kentonv »

webstrand wrote: post #219

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.

You can serve non-HTML content from Workers. This is explicitly called out in the supplemental terms for the Developer Platform here:

https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/

(I'm the lead engineer on Workers. I don't know what happened to OP, though; I'm not personally looped into that conversation.)

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

#224

Post by bluedino »

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?

Rep probably rolled their eyes, said "that's why 99% of the accounts get turned off", and sighed.

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

#226

Post by mynameisvlad »

nightpool wrote: post #207
lolinder wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is Zapier untrustworthy? ITTT? Microsoft with Flow?

It’s absurd to think that somehow, just because someone works on tools that help people do things without code, that they’re somehow untrustworthy because of targeting “customers not sophisticated enough”. That’s insulting to both the service and their customers.

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

#227

Post by dismantlethesun »

yamtaddle wrote: post #220
godzillabrennus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree. I contacted Cloudflare sales for a small order of just a 100k or so per year, and they totally ghosted me after my first round of questions. No quote, no contact, nada.

I gave up and went to Fastly.

You may say my order was too tiny but even Akamai gave a response; they just didn’t have any turn key product that suited my needs.

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

#228

Post by genewitch »

slig wrote: post #193
jgrahamc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they could just email me (jgc@cloudflare.com)

I have a question that I couldn't find on the help docs: I got several domains on the early bird Pro price. Do you plan to discontinue the Early Bird pricing this year with the pricing increase?

Money is not free, the cost of money has gone up considerably in the past 6 months. I haven't seen any indications that money will be cheaper anytime soon.

All "VC funded" "free tier" and the like will be put on the back-burner. If you know anyone with a small datacenter and a decent peering agreement (3 lines of at least gbit) now would be the time to kick money their way, and tell everyone else to.

It was tough times for small companies these past several years. Imagine trying to compete with netflix when their price was "all you (and everyone you know) can eat MP4s for $8". I actually cancelled my netflix subscription as we weren't using it anymore and the price was creeping up faster than siriusXM subscriptions.

I know this is edgelord to post on a VC forum, but I haven't seen any indication i am wrong yet. Big news is 80,000-120,000 tech workers being laid off by the big 10, but what about all of the layoffs at smaller companies that are VC funded? What's that number look like?

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

#229

Post by mynameisvlad »

vb-8448 wrote: post #38

Very similar to this other one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34235237 I just repost the same comment I put in the above thread > The thing that scary me most is that his business get shut down without any notice period (at least the author not mentioning any previous communications from Cloudflare team about the issue). > This is really a shitty thing from Cloudflare, you cannot shut down an already running bu…

I disagree. The other one was a clear case of someone knowingly breaking the TOS (same non-HTML content but in that case they were hosting a service which almost exclusively returns non-HTML content). The OP even admitted in the comments that they knew very well they were breaking the TOS but wanted some notice.

I don’t really feel any sympathy for that poster. They knowingly broke the rules, they had to have known that CF could come and shut them down at any time, and they still went ahead and threw the pity party knowing that they are pretty much entirely in the wrong. It’s very much a “play dumb games, win dumb prizes”.

Would it be nice for CF to give a heads up? Sure. But I don’t think it’s required, and especially not in an egregious case like that one.

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