TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.
TL;DR
A decently big casino, as you could guess from the article, was getting away with Cloudflare’s Business Plan (250$/month, which even the author in the post agrees was a “fairly low price”, likely downplaying it).
The Cloudflare team reached out to them to let them know their usage does not fit into the tier anymore and they need to pay the custom price of an Enterprise plan, which may, or may not have been fair since the author does not provide any relevant data, because they were cut off from the stats since they had their account terminated.
The casino refused and indicated they are at talks with Fastly, which was a stupid thing to tell to the CF team, because on their end it was looking like “yeah, we’re going to keep freeloading until we move to another company”, so they decided to terminate the casino’s account.
The story taught the author not to rely on proprietary services. I hope it might also teach them not to rely on any service if they are getting away with a price that is way too cheap for the resources they consume.
With all that said, Cloudflare has shown that they cannot be relied upon. No business can work with a supplier that will just suddenly cut you off without there being some clear breach of contract and the possibility to clear things up.
The behavior from Cloudflare shown here is what you expect from some shady Russian “cheapo SaaS for you!”-provider.
Sounds like that’s exactly what happened?
What part of their existing plan were they in breach of? And why was there no description of what difference in cost there would be for different usage once they were told of the plan Cloudflare considered right for them?
This is one side of the story. It’s entirely possible CF did provide those details
When you don’t play by their rules and freeload the shit out of their plan and thus violate their terms of service… yeah Termination happens, tough love.
I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.
“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.
I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!
Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.
Considering the way they presented what was obviously them trying to skirt the rules, it isn’t hard to believe that CF did provide that info, and it just wasn’t presented in this writeup.
Not that I have any love for CF, just saying this is a case of no one being trustworthy.
I agree, there simply isnt “unlimited” services. Also I don’t see any mention of unlimited anything on CloudFlares tiered plans, maybe I’m blind.
They don’t say unlimited, but they also won’t say the limit of their reverse proxy service. It’s intentionally vague.
I think they’re leaving out that they are breaching contract. Someone commented on their article calling them out for essentially getting CF’s IPs blacklisted. If this casino would switch to Enterprise then they would have to bring their own ips and it wouldn’t affect CF (since CF’s ips are shared across all customers)