281–290 of 329 posts
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Business Development Representative.
Impressively, the expansion conveys about as much information as the acronym. "Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.
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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…
> I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account That is a very broken process! Ask the user to change the ticket, so they can do something that they already know is approved? Sales department sounds like a disaster.
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…
I investigated Cloudflare and the $200/mo plan seemed to good to be true so I contacted sales who verified that yes, it was too good to be true and my usage of the $200/mo plan would violate their ToS. They initially quoted $5k/mo over the phone, and then came back with a formal quote with a number much higher than that.
My take is that Cloudflare's product is so good that they can get away with any kind of sales practices they want. It's like shooting fish in a barrel: just analyze customers on the $200/mo tier and find the ones that look like they could spend way more. It's not even wrong in concept: sales upselling is SOP, and the low-cost tiers provide a lot of value to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they're offering. But the combination of the two sure leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
AWS doesn't have transparent pricing either, but in a different way. Yes, you can use more and more bandwidth and know exactly what you'll get charged, but once you get to Cloudflare Enterprise levels of bandwidth the AWS sticker prices would be astronomical and everyone negotiates non-transparent lower rates.
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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.
In reality Im in the same exact position you are and maybe I just want to believe this is something other than that. I dont see why they would care about the content. There has to be something else to this story.
I didn't deploy yet and this has me scared enough to get me thinking about an alternative. Time to spin up a new linode instance I guess.
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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…
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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.
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> 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…
It's a wrong comparison. I'm not saying that people that are abusing CF's services are not guilty.
> I mean, it was clear enough for the other OP to know they went against it.
The point is not about these specific cases(in the one I posted it's definitely user's fault, this one is more ambiguous) but how CF acts.
The automatic/human process inside CF that decided to "ban" doesn't know if users are aware or not. They just assume (as you) that's user's fault and proceed with the "ban". While, if I'm running a service for months or even years and no one complains, there are a lot of good reason to assume that I don't do anything wrong.
Imagine that you have a totally compliant service but, because of a bug in their detection mechanism, your service goes down, and it takes days or even weeks to clarify everything with them and bring it up again.
It's an insane "default".
I mean, for CF nothing changes if they give you an x days notice but for your business changes a lot and (as mentioned before) when you run 1/3 of internet it's not only about the TOS.
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...
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> 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…
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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.
But I don't understand why he had to talk to enterprise sales at all if he was already a paying customer, why couldn't he just check a check-box for "High JSON file transfer" and pay an extra fee, then sales could contact him at their leisure to discuss an enterprise contract that might save him money (and they can upsell him on more vendor-lockin services that he'd get with that enterprise contract)