Comment by luuurker
8 months ago
The way Cloudflare approaches situations like this is not ideal for anyone.
You start using the service and don't pay a lot, so you make plans around a certain level of expenses. Then out of the blue you receive an "urgent" email from a sales representative and suddenly you have to go from $20 or $250 to $thousands right away.
Obviously it's not in CF's interest to keep a customer that doesn't pay enough, but dropping a "bomb" on the customer and make them feel like they're about to be kicked out from the service makes the customer lose trust on CF.
CF can probably match Fastly's price. If they had acted differently in this and other similar situations, they could keep the customer, be paid more, trust wouldn't be affected, and there would be no bad PR here.
Since the CF management that posts on HN usually say this is not supposed to happen, perhaps someone needs to sit down and look at the incentives sales reps have? Even if you don't care about the customers, this is affecting the CF brand a lot.
> but dropping a "bomb" on the customer
Why on earth any company would jump from $250 to $10k per month unless they had a gun to their heads? Even if their revenue is to the millions/billions (which most likely is considering the nature of their business). They work for their own profit, not Cloudflare's.
No one wants to pay more, but if they do it in a way that makes their customer run to a direct competitor and not want to come back, then maybe there's something wrong with their approach.
We only have one side of the story here, but it's not the first time I've seen posts/comments about these emails from Cloudflare and the messy communication that follows. As a business customer, I really hope I don't have to deal with any of this.
The point is it doesn't have to be a "gun to their head". It just needs to be a serious of emails, calls and negotiation.
I'll be they are now paying Fastly a lot closer to $10k/month than $250/month
Seems pretty reasonable if the $250/mo plan is costing Cloudflare close to or more than that amount of money due to any loophole or other unforseen expense in the plan.
What seems interesting to me is just what the loophole is and how many other business are also on the radar for this drastic pricing change. Are there other goodwill discounts Cloudflare is ready to start collecting on, or does the gambling site represent a unique situation?
have you seen the twitter post from Gamdom about mentioning the fastly quote in negotiations? they were taken down instantly. It doesn't sound safe to mention competitors with them or even exercise the prospect of leaving