Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 329 posts

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

#271

Post by nullcaution »

_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…

> It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience...

That is rather aggressive?? Maybe thry live in another time zone and are asleep, or have other obligations like school pickup. Given them at least 24 hours to respond. sheesh...

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

#272

Post by supermatt »

runako wrote: post #213
supermatt wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provi…

As you sound like an IP lawyer, I will defer. But would still suggest the OP get a written opinion for his specific case from his own IP lawyer.

Not an IP lawyer, not giving advice. Just aware of what a trademark is and isn’t.

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

#273

Post by luckylion »

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 wouldn't you do both? And if your sales department is maxed out by chasing the big contracts so much so that they don't have time to onboard someone spending 50k a year, get more sales people.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

nullcaution wrote: post #271
_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…

> It's not OK to be like "HN I had a bad experience... That is rather aggressive?? Maybe thry live in another time zone and are asleep, or have other obligations like school pickup. Given them at least 24 hours to respond. sheesh...

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by lowercased »

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.

Unsure how it's "chasing" when people call you. I'm more than a 'warm lead' at that point. I'm calling you wanting to buy your product. And yeah, I know not everyone who calls wants to buy immediately - some are just tire kickers or getting a quote. But... again... it's not 'chasing'. It's not even 'selling' so much as 'order taking', imo.

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

#277

Post by andrewstuart »

"The large print giveth, the small print taketh away" has never been more true than with Cloudflare.

None of Cloudflare's marketing or technical documentation makes any explicit reference to "permitted usages" for Cloudflare services such as R2 and Workers.

This page for example means one thing without any reference to permitted usages and would mean something entirely different if the permitted usages were promoted with the same level of visibility as the benefits.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/

Nothing here tells me I cannot write my own video serving code with Workers:

https://workers.cloudflare.com/

You might even believe "whatever you need" from this paragraph from the above link:

"Static assets with dynamic power. Say goodbye to build steps which pre-generate thousands of assets in advance. Harness the unrivaled raw power of the edge to generate images, SVGs, PDFs, whatever you need, on the fly, and deliver them to users as quickly as a static asset."

This developer documentation would takes on an entirely new meaning if a link to "acceptable uses" was prominent at the top of each page (not fine print).

https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started/

https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-access/workers-api...

https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/examples/demo-worker/

Have built an entire application around assuming there were no such limitations I now need to rebuild elsewhere.

Humph.

I now no longer even understand what "no egress fees" means - in a way that's worse than the big cloud providers where at least you know they are charging you 9 cents per gigabyte.

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

#278

Post by readonthegoapp »

i feel like this is a repeating theme, and i've seen it at a company i was at.

in my view, the root of the problem is that companies don't have usage limits in place.

they often have 'sort of' usage limits in place -- that is, they don't actually have metrics for their customers' usage, and that leads to these situations.

and these situations are insane resource hogs -- teams of people spending days to try to figure out whether some customer should be bumped up to the next level.

it doesn't happen, then the customer gets cut off.

pretty messed up for Cloudflare to try and destroy a company like that for no reason.

we get these wishy-washy usage/support/sales situations with a lot of ambigous back and forth, and BIGCOMPANY trying to kill _littlecompany_, etc.

set usage limits, when they're surpassed, move the customer to the higher tier, done.

plenty more you can do around the edges, like grace periods, etc. etc., but i feel like this is amateur hour and cruel indifference - in this case, from Cloudflare -- and not the first time we've seen indifference from them, and other BIGTECH companies.

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

#279

Post by CamperBob2 »

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.

This is why these types of complaints need to be cc:'ed to your congressional representatives in the US or EU representatives elsewhere. No one else can do anything about the root problem of companies that take customers' money and deny any form of accountability.

For every customer who gets lucky on Twitter or HN, there are probably a dozen who end up with no recourse at all.

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

#280

Post by notahacker »

lowercased wrote: post #275
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.

Unsure how it's "chasing" when people call you. I'm more than a 'warm lead' at that point. I'm calling you wanting to buy your product. And yeah, I know not everyone who calls wants to buy immediately - some are just tire kickers or getting a quote. But... again... it's not 'chasing'. It's not even 'selling' so much as 'order taking', imo.

yeah, any decently set up sales team for any company selling to the whole market ought to have some sort of sales team member that's happy dealing with higher volumes of transactional sales, even if the main focus of most of the team is million dollar accounts, unless their self service programme scales to massive numbers or they don't deal with smaller companies at all.

Someone ringing up to say "I need a quote for this level of usage as I think I'm into your enterprise tier" might be asking for a smaller quote than the Big Fish the BDR has sent a cold email to who's eventually been convinced to take a meeting, but they're more likely to convert and unlikely to take lots of meetings or a particularly skilled salesperson to do it...

Post reply on HN