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.
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 prepare me an offer in 15 minutes, but it was taking longer (no response after an hour or so) and in the meanwhile I wrote Twitter and HN post which CTO of Cloudflare noticed and then after a while I've got another phone call from sales that I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account as it was approved now by CTO which I did and that solved the issue at least for now - and that's it - no further info what the issue was, still waiting on Enterprise plan quote for me.
Reality is that Cloudflare serves 60% of the internet and this issue popped up. They are checking it internally what happened, as I understand from jgrahamc.
Again, that doesn't seem to apply here, but I've stopped assuming that the existence of an HN support thread by itself shows malfeasance or incompetence on the part of the company.
The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.
I don't know if this is the case for CF but it seems to be for other businesses.
[EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.
It’s absurd to think that somehow, just because someone works on tools that help people do things without code, that they’re somehow untrustworthy because of targeting “customers not sophisticated enough”. That’s insulting to both the service and their customers.
I gave up and went to Fastly.
You may say my order was too tiny but even Akamai gave a response; they just didn’t have any turn key product that suited my needs.
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.
I know they're doing good but Cloudflare must be even more successful than I thought if they can afford that level of ineptitude at sales level
I don't think it's usually that they don't know what's going on, but that they don't want to tell you, because they think that's giving away too many details.
I've been flagged in many systems as I move around in the world quite a bit, so sometimes I use a credit card acquired in one country in another, and a couple of days later using it on the other side of the planet, which triggers their anti-fraud systems. Then I write to them and they reply something like "Unfortunately you cannot continue to use our services as your account been flagged as potential fraudulent use. We cannot give you any details because then it'll be easier for fraudulent actors to work around it, so I'm sorry we cannot tell you anything else. Bye."
They have someone on the hook with customers hounding them to get their system back online and it isn’t worth spending a few minutes to quote a guaranteed sale?
Something about a bird in the hand comes to mind…
"Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.
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...
This is why these types of complaints need to be cc:'ed to your congressional representatives in the US or EU representatives elsewhere. No one else can do anything about the root problem of companies that take customers' money and deny any form of accountability.
For every customer who gets lucky on Twitter or HN, there are probably a dozen who end up with no recourse at all.
Someone ringing up to say "I need a quote for this level of usage as I think I'm into your enterprise tier" might be asking for a smaller quote than the Big Fish the BDR has sent a cold email to who's eventually been convinced to take a meeting, but they're more likely to convert and unlikely to take lots of meetings or a particularly skilled salesperson to do it...
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.
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)
I fully agree with what you’re saying but it doesn’t speak well of Cloudflare to have this gap. If they don’t want or handle accounts at this mid tier level, they should have a have a self service tier to handle it.
I actually don't know any businesses ( except solo ones) that don't have issues tbh. It's part of having employees.
That cloudfare handles 60% of the internet, just makes the odds really high for someone to complain.
It's resolved pretty quick and they are following up internally on what happened.
And the OP mentioned himselve what the issue was fyi. Check his latest post. This whole thing is about someone bending the rules concerning CW and he knows it :)
Hell no. Using workers for non-html content is not "bending the rules". It's a normal and encouraged use case. And saying "I'm a heavy user, is that maybe part of it?" does not mean they did anything wrong.
I don't see any signs of bending rules.
And someone going "Is this too much load? Are they not being paid enough?" as desperate guesses after getting banned, does not mean they were actually doing anything borderline or that they "know it".
And to requote the OP back to you like I did above, given that customer support told them there's a 24hr limit to that ban becoming permanent and tried to help them get it resolved before then, in this case it was in fact entirely reasonable to expect at least a one-line update within (in this specific case) a day, since either way the outcome would be known.
And in fact here's the OP's followup post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34721870