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.
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.
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.
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.