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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

#261

Post by phaedrix »

Cloudflare support is complete garbage.

We upgraded to Enterprise, and had some issues because CF's documentation was not clear (literally a blog post), and their support took many days to even respond and then their response made it clear they hadn't even read the ticket.

I'd move everything into AWS in a second if moving DNS wasn't such a pain.

Also am forced to use the global api token because constantly get rate limited using permission-scoped api tokens -- this is from a simple Terraform plan (first thing in the morning) and after them increasing my rate limit to the max.

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

#262

Post by CallMeJim »

hapidjus wrote: post #260
bastardoperator wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Business Development Representative.

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

#263

Post by mynameisvlad »

vb-8448 wrote: post #259
mynameisvlad wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Warnings are nice, but it's ultimately the user's responsibility to read and understand the TOS, what they can and can't do. Ignorance is no defense. Just because you didn't know murder is illegal does not mean you can go kill random people and claim "oopsie, I didn't know, I wish you had warned me ahead of time".

> suddenly they decided to change strategy

They never changed strategy. It has always been explicitly against the TOS and explicitly mentioned as something you can't do in their documentation. Just because someone is below the threshold for Cloudflare's automated detection does not mean CF is allowing their use. Their use is still against the terms they agreed to, it's just not detected yet. If you are doing things you know are against the TOS, like that other poster, then you should very well know that your time is limited and your access can be yanked at any point in time.

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

#264

Post by Dylan16807 »

kentonv wrote: post #223
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.)

Another comment says "From what I understood is that it requires a manual over-ride on R2/ Workers because the thing that checks for the 2.8 TOS violation is not able to see the difference between Workers/ R2 and the standard CDN service. If you go to the R2 Discord channel you see this happening every other week"

Is that at all plausible?

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

#265

Post by stale2002 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #263
vb-8448 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Warnings are nice, but it's ultimately the user's responsibility to read and understand the TOS, what they can and can't do. Ignorance is no defense. Just because you didn't know murder is illegal does not mean you can go kill ran…

> Warnings are nice, but it's ultimately the user's responsibility

It is actually ultimately the responsibility of the company, cloudflare, to clearly communicate their rules and ToS to the users. Because they are the multi-billion dollar business, and making things clear is their responsibility.

Throwing your hands up, and blaming confusion on the user is a way to rightfully cause users to hate you, and rightfully cause you a large amount of monetary damage as people decide that your company is not worth the risk.

Or even more, a user is within their right to cause large amount of monetary damages to the company, via viral social media outrages, such as this one. PR damage is real, and is a totally valid tactic, that a large company deserves, if they are making mistakes like this.

And it seemed like the damage caused by this post was very real. Cloudflare executives are posting in this thread.

So, actually, I would say that it is not just nice, but obligated to provide warnings, elsewise you get a situation like this, which is causing real damage to the company.

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

#266

Post by tebbers »

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.

Thank you.

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

#267

Post by UncleEntity »

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.

> Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars?

They have someone on the hook with customers hounding them to get their system back online and it isn’t worth spending a few minutes to quote a guaranteed sale?

Something about a bird in the hand comes to mind…

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

#268

Post by tobyjsullivan »

CallMeJim wrote: post #262
hapidjus wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BDR?

Business Development Representative.

Impressively, the expansion conveys about as much information as the acronym.

"Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.

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

#269

Post by mynameisvlad »

stale2002 wrote: post #265
mynameisvlad wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Warnings are nice, but it's ultimately the user's responsibility to read and understand the TOS, what they can and can't do. Ignorance is no defense. Just because you didn't know murder is illegal does not mean you can go kill ran…

> Warnings are nice, but it's ultimately the user's responsibility It is actually ultimately the responsibility of the company, cloudflare, to clearly communicate their rules and ToS to the users. Because they are the multi-billion dollar business, and making things clear is their responsibility. Throwing your hands up, and blaming confusion on the user is a way to rightfully cause users to hate you, and rightfully c…

How, exactly, is the TOS and pages mentioning this limitation not clear?

I mean, it was clear enough for the other OP to know they went against it. They didn’t need to be told, they already knew their usage was against the TOS and just didn’t like that Cloudflare decided to enforce the rule they very well knew they were already breaking. They even said it themselves.

I already even said that is why I don’t agree the issues are in any way the same, but you opted to ignore that and continue down your diatribe of “it’s always the company’s fault”.

> Throwing your hands up, and blaming confusion on the user is a way to rightfully cause users to hate you, and rightfully cause you a large amount of monetary damage as people decide that your company is not worth the risk.

TIL that users are just allowed to do whatever they want with no repercussions because it’s too difficult to read the agreement they signed. The one that tells them what they’re explicitly not allowed to do. But no, definitely the company’s fault that a customer was taking advantage of them and their services. Totally.

> Cloudflare executives are posting in this thread.

So? People post here all the time. “HackerNews support” is a trope at this point and says nothing but that executives want to do damage control. It says nothing about the TOS being clear on the issue.

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

#270

Post by rightbyte »

twawaaay wrote: post #149
rightbyte wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you doing RAM-aaS or something? Must be alot of redundant data back and forth.

I said nothing about the application and you already know everything about it. Seems like I spent quarter of century in this business for naught.

There is a huge waste of power on the internet with data going back and forth for no good reason.

Obviously I have no clue about your work.

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