There are so many questions this leaves unanswered:
- Was this a one-off error in Cloudflare's processes? (These things happen on a big enough scale.)
- Were you violating a specific clause of Cloudflare's T&C? How clear was the clause? What did you do to fix this?
- Was the issue that Cloudflare estimated that you're not paying enough given the bandwidth you're consuming? Did you end up signing up for the Enterprise plan?
Transparency would benefit both Cloudflare (in not making people unnecessarily apprehensive about becoming/remaining a customer) and you (in demonstrating that you're handling this issue in a professional and responsible manner).
That would be the right way to give back for customers using us as an amplifier and for corporations relying on us to be a shibboleth (a prefilter so providers know that this is a true issue unsolvable through existing support channels they have established for customers).
Sharing these learnings with other potential founders would also be in line with the raison d’etre of HN. It would provide other founders with lessons they can takeaway and apply to their future startups to maybe do a few of these things right the first time around.
For both sides, HN is “picking up slack” in the system and it would be right to support the community with candid postmortems.