Comment by bluelightning2k
8 months ago
At the moment the account got banned, I would guess that the CloudFlare sales team had this down as a "60% likely to close, estimated close in 6 weeks".
There is just no reason they would suspect that they were going to lose the deal to Fastly at this moment. They were very much the default winner.
Extortion or not, I just can't fathom that they ragequit the deal at this moment, because they were about to win it.
It therefore seems likely that after looking into it they disqualified it as a business category which is against their TOS or whatever.
Or that the enforcement and sales teams have very similar, overlapping triggers for engagement, etc.
Cloudflare's behaviour here was shitty and this is not the only report. By all means their reputation is very generous free tier and a horrible experience in paying.
BUT seriously who ragequits a winning deal? Another comment summed this up - the attention caused them to take a look and realize they don't support shady-ish casinos, possibly (seeming to) evade US legislation, etc.
> It therefore seems likely that after looking into it they disqualified it as a business category which is against their TOS or whatever.
The first sales email is from a Cloudflare with “Gaming Division” in their email signature, so they were clearly aware of the nature of the customer’s business. Moreover, it seems they have an entire department dedicated to serving the gaming market.
It's quite a common pattern in saas. Someone gets through automated ToS checks with some niche use case and escalates some unrelated issue to support which triggers manual ToS review. That being said, a corporation as big as CF with 120k usd bills should do better and never let this happen. Very amateur.