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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

#181
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trademarks are for specific categories of goods/services. The trademark is for: - Audiovisual media - Books - Clothing - Toys - Entertainment events

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; )) […

[deleted]

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

#182
post #171
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like jgrahamc are the people who care and are embarrassed their company provides such unreliable service. I just wish the people in charge of these companies felt the same responsibility and embarrassment.

jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare.

I did not know that. That certainly changes things.

I don't know how many people work at Cloudflare, but I'd imagine it's more efficient to have a working customer support system than to have the CTO personally handle every problem.

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

#183
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..

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re changing your arch because you saw a one-sided completely unverified post on HN? At this point @jgrahamc has the worst of it - people show up here time after time hoping they can make enough of a stink to get him involved.

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

The fact that you just post your e-mail address and invite your (likely many) customers here to reach out to you would probably surprise me from another company.

I've been doing this long enough that just about every major vendor I've worked with has had (and taken) the opportunity to disappoint me with some unreasonable decision/change and even an occasional (unwarranted) account suspension. I think I've convinced every customer I've worked with to purchase a Cloudflare subscription. I've worked with support once and I've worked with someone handling the beta testing for Warp (a Romanian gentleman -- he called me and shipped me a T-Shirt).

The two people I talked with didn't have to tell me they enjoyed their job. You could hear it in their voice. The guy I talked to about Warp was as far from a salesperson as someone could be, yet he couldn't help explain some of the details about how interesting of a product Warp is.

I can't count how many times I've pointed people at the Cloudflare blog to learn about "how all of the stuff between your code and the user's browser 'works'". I remember reading a post several years ago thinking "they're basically explaining how they achieved a major competitive advantage well enough for a competitor to duplicate." I didn't think that it was a bad idea to do so -- realistically, it didn't represent a loss of IP -- I'm just surprised so much energy/time would be spent writing highly technical posts that sometimes "give away secret recipes" in a sense. It's wonderful from where I sit.

I expect the HN crowd will recognize that people who have a problem/issue/incident with a company/product are a "flobbity-jillion" times more likely to write a post (and have it hit the front page) than a guy like me who's had 30-ish opportunities to integrate your products into things I've written and have been delighted every time.

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

#185

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…

fly.io is pretty expensive compared to wholesale bandwidth rates. Especially for Europe.

Their bandwidth pricing is competing with AWS, not wholesale bandwidth rates.

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

#186
While I agree HN shouldn't be used as a way to get direct customer support, I don't think it's fair to grab and point our pitchforks to @jgrahamc over a one sided story. There's not nearly enough information from both sides to create fair judgement (these things happen, unfortunately, at larger scale with automated processes). What matters is the afterthought and actions taken of what's going to prevent a similar situation in the future (which I'd love to read from both OP and @jgrahamc if possible). HN is my go to stop for well formulated opinions written by people way smarter than me and I think we dropped the ball here, HN can do better. That said, happy that your issue got resolved OP and goodluck with your project!

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

#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 explain even basic uses of the tool and things like Workers are near impossible to discuss with them. I was really unsurprised to see that OP had a failed Enterprise negotiation with them as I have had the exact same conversation at three different companies now and can imagine perfectly what you were told.

The current offerings of Enterprise and Enterprise Lite simply do not map to the reality of how people use the tool and scale businesses on top of it. I think in part due to Cloudflare's history essentially selling bandwidth and caching, the model is fixated on high binary traffic workloads and simply cannot comprehend the SaaS service model that runs on it and tools like Workers.

This is mostly a rant and hopefully a small +1 signal that this area needs major improvement - but I would also love to hear if anyone else has had interactions with Cloudflare Enterprise and how they found that process?

(Disclaimer: I'm a massive fan of Cloudflare, a user of their products and hold their stock)

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outage started around 00:00UTC today. I was able to contact via support chat to confirm it's indeed Cloudflare related issue as wasn't sure as it's not displayed in any form on Cloudflare dashboard that indeed account is restricted. That was around 8AM UTC. Since then I also contacted with sales team (got the details already as they approached me in last few weeks as mentioned before) in order to upgrade to Enterpris…

> Since then I also contacted with sales team … in order to upgrade to Enterprise plan as it seems like the only solution Talk about coercion. Considering that you weren’t, technically speaking, violating any terms of service, this response from them leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. Good luck, and thank you for sharing this with us all.

The correlation between between being contacted by Cloudflare sales and the throttling should serve as a warning for other customers.

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

#189
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 prepare me an offer in 15 minutes, but it was taking longer (no response after an hour or so) and in the meanwhile I wrote Twitter and HN post which CTO of Cloudflare noticed and then after a while I've got another phone call from sales that I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account as it was approved now by CTO which I did and that solved the issue at least for now - and that's it - no further info what the issue was, still waiting on Enterprise plan quote for me.

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

#190
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trademarks are for specific categories of goods/services. The trademark is for: - Audiovisual media - Books - Clothing - Toys - Entertainment events

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 providing crypto pricing (or whatever it is they do), or believe that they are made by the same organization.

But I suppose people do litigate this stuff (or threaten to...), regardless of the spirit and letter of the law.

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