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[return to "Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer"]
1. cultof+47[view] [source] 2023-02-03 10:59:50
>>tardis+(OP)
Literally just sent an email to my devops guys to move off cloudflare asap. This cavalier lack of respect is a diservice and insult to all the people who rely on my product for their livelihood.
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2. kkielh+Oc[view] [source] 2023-02-03 11:55:07
>>cultof+47
You’re changing your arch because you saw a one-sided completely unverified post on HN?

At this point @jgrahamc has the worst of it - people show up here time after time hoping they can make enough of a stink to get him involved.

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3. jgraha+Ve[view] [source] 2023-02-03 12:18:19
>>kkielh+Oc
When they could just email me (jgc@cloudflare.com)
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4. iamacy+Kg[view] [source] 2023-02-03 12:34:11
>>jgraha+Ve
The fact that stuff needs to be raised at all is the problem.

Clearly something has gone wrong if customers get treated this way.

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5. mdip+1G[view] [source] 2023-02-03 14:57:51
>>iamacy+Kg
Before piling on too much more, here ...

... Cloudflare has a lot of customers[0]. They have to balance the cost of providing (a lot of) human support against the cost they can reasonably charge for their products. It's a balancing act, and one that has worked out well for me, personally. It sounds like this issue is happening related to R2, which is quite new.

You're not likely to see a post hit the front page with the title "I've integrated Cloudflare's products with 30 or so customers and never had an issue" (or even be written). But experience an issue this large and you're going to do everything -- make calls, post things to social media, reach out on HN where you know the CTO is an active participant -- and a lot of those are going to get attention from the small percentage of customers who felt wronged by CF but hadn't spoken up.

It's a crappy situation because it gives the impression that things are a mess when -- I'm willing to bet -- it's something along the lines of a problem in a quota checker and a failure of internal process to escalate the problem appropriately. That happens at every big company in various places all the time.

Really, the only major difference here is that unlike every other big company, their CTO actively watches Hacker News. When a problem pops up, he willingly chooses to be Customer Service and from the sounds of it, that escalation to address "problems like this" is now happening. There's going to be gaps like this at every company. When I worked at "BigCo", if something like this hit the front page of HN, you could expect a mess of people to have their phones ring. Work would be done to respond to the customer (variations on "acknowledge/minimize/suppress" communications -- on official company hosts). Staff would be forbidden from interacting in the ongoing discussion. The CTO might have had to have explained to him how to get to the web site containing the complaint.

[0] I don't work for them; I'm just a happy customer so everything here is my view from the outside.

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