Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by nolok » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

dismantlethesun wrote: post #227

yamtaddle wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait they're less reponsive than Akamai ? I ran away from Akamai because of their sales people and how they apparently embedded their dark soul straight into the user interface they give you to use, and by use I mean summon an akamai billing person from the depths because you're not allowed to do anything without them.

I know they're doing good but Cloudflare must be even more successful than I thought if they can afford that level of ineptitude at sales level

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

#252

Post by nolok » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 5:43 PM UTC

NicoJuicy wrote: post #191

_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…

Cloudflare is really transparant about things ( eg. outages). Reality is that Cloudflare serves 60% of the internet and this issue popped up. They are checking it internally what happened, as I understand from jgrahamc.

I don't think you realize it, but your answer while being wrong on many levels isn't even saying what you think it is saying. Reading your message, what one understands is "Cloudflare has so much on their hand you would be stupid to give them your business and think they would have time to deal with it", aka run away.

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

#253

Post by mathattack » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

genewitch wrote: post #232

mathattack wrote: post #211

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…

20 billion in exchange for control of 10% of global traffic and 30% of US traffic seems awful low.

Imagine their size and market cap if people could trust their Sales organization.

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

#254

Post by yamtaddle » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #62

> ...anyways I get it, perhaps I pay too little and should be on enterprise plan already If you're on Workers Unbound, you're probably paying closer to ~$800/mo for 4b requests; or if you're on Workers Bundled, then ~2000/mo. What were you quoted for the Enterprise plan? I thought those start at $1500/mo?

> I thought those start at $1500/mo?

I wasn't able to get them to size something down under high-$4,000/m, when I looked at this a couple years ago. They acted like I was being annoying just for thinking there might exist any option between $200 and $5,000.

We ended up somewhere else that was much cheaper for the actual service we needed. Every other company in this space I talked to was happy to come up with a plan that fit our needs and didn't include stuff we didn't need, plus their (negotiated, not public) outbound transfer rates were in every case cheaper than what CloudFlare's sales team offered us. They'd even offer high-touch onboarding help in that sub-$5k/m range (I didn't ask, they just offered)

I think our spending's actually over $5k/m many months, now, but it'd be even higher at CF since the best rate on transfer they offered us wasn't great. I gather the actual customer demo they want is big, complex enterprises that need tunnels between multiple physical networks, oddball proxying set-ups, and stuff like that. That's not us, so they weren't a good fit—but what's weird is their self-serve plans look like they're trying to court use cases closer to ours, while they have no decent options for smoothly sizing up past that.

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

#255

Post by pier25 » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

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.

I'm working an audio hosting SaaS and relying on Workers to stream and cache audio.

What can I do to prevent this from happening to me and my users?

This would be disastrous for my company.

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

#256

Post by capableweb » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

> 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 think it's usually that they don't know what's going on, but that they don't want to tell you, because they think that's giving away too many details.

I've been flagged in many systems as I move around in the world quite a bit, so sometimes I use a credit card acquired in one country in another, and a couple of days later using it on the other side of the planet, which triggers their anti-fraud systems. Then I write to them and they reply something like "Unfortunately you cannot continue to use our services as your account been flagged as potential fraudulent use. We cannot give you any details because then it'll be easier for fraudulent actors to work around it, so I'm sorry we cannot tell you anything else. Bye."

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

#257

Post by pffft8888 » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

Wow. I was just about to code a key part of our startup's platform using workers and durable objects. I had zero idea that workers are intended for html output and that if they were used for JSON-RPC they would ban us if we are too successful. Crazy. The whole point of the service is free egress. What a joke. Pass. Will look into Fastly.

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

#258

Post by supriyo-biswas » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #243

philliphaydon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a link? Curious what he was doing!

"Shady shit", aka nothing illegal. If it was illegal, there'd be police, not account closure.

Companies dealing with money often have AML obligations which means shutting down the shady shit before police or regulators get involved.

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

#259

Post by vb-8448 » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #229

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 t…

In my opinion, it doesn't matter.

They "tolerated" a non-compliant use of their service for so long time (maybe because in the past their only goal was to increase adoption?!?) and suddenly they decided to change strategy?! No problem, it's their choice, but adding an x days grace period should be the standard. It's really easy to do.

> Would it be nice for CF to give a heads up?

Well yes, it will be really welcome. Mostly for all other their user(1/3 of internet or something like this) that maybe doesn't even know there are not full-compliant to TOS and risk their business to be terminated suddenly.

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

#260

Post by hapidjus » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 6:56 PM UTC

bastardoperator wrote: post #246

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…

Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.

BDR?