I have a leak in my ceiling and my landlord doesnt even answer my texts anymore. I feel you.
Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#22This would be an excellent use of small claims court; you want paid-for service provided and they’re giving you the phone-tree runaround. The court would prefer a settlement be reached before trial and their legal team will have no trouble bypassing their support AI to get a ticket opened.
Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court. Had a similar situation happen with another company. Went to take them to small claims but the judge threw it out because of the arbitration clause. We then spent months and many resources but were unable to continue because we couldn't successfully contact their arbitrator to proceed w…
> Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court.
They can only enforce that contractual agreement IF THEY SHOW UP TO COURT. Which costs them money, which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.
In your case you wanted a cash settlement. In OP's case they want a resolution. Apples Vs. Oranges.
edit: Looks like someone at Cloudflare responded to OP's issue below anyway.
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#23Hi. I am sorry about this issue. Can you email dane@cloudflare.com, and it will get resolved? I am also working on more systematic fixes for when customers get into this situation.
Weird how support suddenly answers questions when the tickets become public.
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court. Had a similar situation happen with another company. Went to take them to small claims but the judge threw it out because of the arbitration clause. We then spent months and many resources but were unable to continue because we couldn't successfully contact their arbitrator to proceed w…
> Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court. They can only enforce that contractual agreement IF THEY SHOW UP TO COURT. Which costs them money, which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win. In your case you wanted a cash settlement. In OP's case they want a resolution. App…
> which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.
Precisely this. It isn’t always about getting your whole day in court; sometimes it’s just about getting a human to intervene at all.
That said, arbitration would be just as acceptable as small claims court here. Either way, legal will see the petition and escalate internally. Arbitration costs a lot more than having someone open a support ticket, especially if your complaint says in plain language:
“This is solely to get a human to tech support my problem because I’m trapped in a phone tree loop that won’t let me file a support ticket. I plan to withdraw my complaint as soon as a human being engages with the technical issue preventing me from contacting support, so I can resume spending my money on Cloudflare.”
(Notice that this is careful not to demand a resolution to the issue. That’s really important.)
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#25> Is shaming them on Twitter my only option left? Shaming them on here works better, if you get to the frontpage then their CEO or CTO will probably show up to defuse the situation.
Their CEO is notorious for replying to “normal” people. I’ve emailed him a few things and to my surprise he replied to my email. Which is a good thing!
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#26ask and tell them on twitter maybe that will help u.
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#27One of the things I was most surprised about recently is just how buggy and unpleasant to use the Cloudflare dashboard is. We only moved to them recently and I was really shocked. I had one situation where the dashboard literally showed me the wrong domain but rules for another, which I think was a session or caching bug. I really thought it would be better for a company that size!
You'd be surprised... I did a LOT of cleanup work for a private college that had a lot of "clever" developers that didn't understand static variables in C#, or how the ASP.Net lifecycle worked. Race conditions and all kinds of weird errors when the system got busy. Not to mention a lot of "fun" performance issues. Just because someone has a CS degree doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing.
That's different, those are clever people who are bad developers. But too proud to admit it even to themselves. You come across them a lot in small/mid sized companies and non-tech IT teams.
Cloudflare's no longer the darling of HN, but they unquestionably have clever people who are excellent developers. Just maybe not excellent at web dev and cache invalidation by the sound of it.
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#28Post it on some social media like X , linkedin, or Bluesky
The Cloudflare team might contact you soon!
They might not care HN, which I dont know
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#29Hi. I am sorry about this issue. Can you email dane@cloudflare.com, and it will get resolved? I am also working on more systematic fixes for when customers get into this situation.
The more systematic fix is to make paying customers speak with actual humans, rather than buggy AI
Very strongly agreed. I can count on no hands the number of times I've contacted a company for support and had any interest in talking to AI. Indeed, the chatbots I've interacted with have all been so comically bad that I wondered if these companies were deliberately trying to frustrate me.
Re: Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
#30One of the things I was most surprised about recently is just how buggy and unpleasant to use the Cloudflare dashboard is. We only moved to them recently and I was really shocked. I had one situation where the dashboard literally showed me the wrong domain but rules for another, which I think was a session or caching bug. I really thought it would be better for a company that size!
Yeah, I constantly get dashboard errors and weird things I have to track down in the browser console to troubleshoot.
At one point I didn't have proper access to something, but instead of getting a message saying that, I got some generic 500 error.