> I would fully understand that I am required to upgrade, but why not sending me an email before shutting down my business completely?
Clearly something has gone wrong if customers get treated this way.
If you go to the R2 Discord channel you see this happening every other week.
What is also kinda annoying is customers can't create support tickets because it requires a plan. Which imo is bad given these customers pay for R2 and often have a ton of data on it (which is why the 2.8 gets hit...).
Hopefully you can get this fixed permanently (for all customers at once, and not case-by-case).
I've been doing this long enough that just about every major vendor I've worked with has had (and taken) the opportunity to disappoint me with some unreasonable decision/change and even an occasional (unwarranted) account suspension. I think I've convinced every customer I've worked with to purchase a Cloudflare subscription. I've worked with support once and I've worked with someone handling the beta testing for Warp (a Romanian gentleman -- he called me and shipped me a T-Shirt).
The two people I talked with didn't have to tell me they enjoyed their job. You could hear it in their voice. The guy I talked to about Warp was as far from a salesperson as someone could be, yet he couldn't help explain some of the details about how interesting of a product Warp is.
I can't count how many times I've pointed people at the Cloudflare blog to learn about "how all of the stuff between your code and the user's browser 'works'". I remember reading a post several years ago thinking "they're basically explaining how they achieved a major competitive advantage well enough for a competitor to duplicate." I didn't think that it was a bad idea to do so -- realistically, it didn't represent a loss of IP -- I'm just surprised so much energy/time would be spent writing highly technical posts that sometimes "give away secret recipes" in a sense. It's wonderful from where I sit.
I expect the HN crowd will recognize that people who have a problem/issue/incident with a company/product are a "flobbity-jillion" times more likely to write a post (and have it hit the front page) than a guy like me who's had 30-ish opportunities to integrate your products into things I've written and have been delighted every time.
... 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.
1. The customer is deplatformed without any notice
2. Customer support is failing to act on a false positive in a prompt manner and the customer has no recourse but to kick up a stink publicly
Both of those are fixable problems and I agree that it's generally a positive to see a company's CTO act in so public a manner. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to improve things from an internal process perspective though.
All "VC funded" "free tier" and the like will be put on the back-burner. If you know anyone with a small datacenter and a decent peering agreement (3 lines of at least gbit) now would be the time to kick money their way, and tell everyone else to.
It was tough times for small companies these past several years. Imagine trying to compete with netflix when their price was "all you (and everyone you know) can eat MP4s for $8". I actually cancelled my netflix subscription as we weren't using it anymore and the price was creeping up faster than siriusXM subscriptions.
I know this is edgelord to post on a VC forum, but I haven't seen any indication i am wrong yet. Big news is 80,000-120,000 tech workers being laid off by the big 10, but what about all of the layoffs at smaller companies that are VC funded? What's that number look like?
And all you do is pop up on HN anytime someone complains, that's enough of a red flag to avoid your business completely and actively keep all my clients away from you.
What can I do to prevent this from happening to me and my users?
This would be disastrous for my company.