Comment by neya
3 days ago
It's not really free. One day, you get a call from their sales team saying "you're straining our network". I kid you not. We were on a business plan and still got this. When we met them in person, we were asked to upgrade to a $2000+ per month plan. From a $200/mo plan. That's a 10x increase. I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay. We refused. That really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Today, I refuse to recommend any client or startup to them because of this extremely unethical practice. All around, I'm not sure they deserve so much positive press/attention, especially after screwing some of their own employees (one even got super famous live streaming the firing).
We had a terrible sales experience with Cloudflare at my last place. They would not budge on the $200 a month quote, and we knew that was BS because the next closest quote we had was $3000 or something. Eventually, like the fourth try, we said, in writing, “just to be clear, for exactly $200, a month we will get XYZ bandwidth”, and of course they said “ohhh well actually maybe it’ll be $8000”.
We had discussed our requirements, our scale, our product with the sales team multiple times but it was only when we wrote down something that we could potentially have used in court that they finally acknowledged their pricing was actually nearly two orders of magnitude higher.
>I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay.
You seem to be pretty cagey about what your usage actually was, and whether it was indeed "straining their network". Were you using more resources/bandwidth than a typical customer would? Most ToS contains clauses that allows the vendor to unilaterally cut customers off if they're an excessive burden, even if there aren't explicit quotas, or are explicitly "unlimited". ISPs don't let you saturate your 1Gbit connection 24 hours a day, even on "unlimited" plans, but I wouldn't call it a "scam" if they told you to upgrade to an enterprise plan.
Well, Cloudflare seems pretty cagey about what their prices are, given they don't reveal them to clients until they are completely tied in.
This is for a normal news website, no gambling, no offensive content. Just regular news. Their business plan explicitly mentioned "unlimited bandwidth" at the time of signing up. I clearly remember reading every bit of their TOS to find any gotchas but there were none.
If you claim you provide unlimited bandwidth, then don't call me tell me I'm straining your network.
By the tone of your comment it does sound like they give you a lot before asking you to pay more.
I still really would like to hear a byte amount. How many bytes are you pushing per month?
I don't believe anything is ever free, and everyone promising "unlimited" will still have a point where you are just costing them too much. CF don't want to say the byte number themselves. Could someone please say the byte number. Someone?
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I've seen enough stories exactly like this from other CF customers to believe it.
I've seen enough stories exactly like this, where it turned out such usage is unusual and a move to a higher priced plan was justified (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31336515), that I find it suspicious whenever people act surprised and outraged at cloudflare upselling them, but are cagey about what exactly their site's doing.
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This "straining the network" is the "unlimited pto" of b2b saas. It's all bullshit. Nebulous and you don't really know what you're getting into until you're too locked in and they squeeze you. Don't do business with companies like this if you can avoid it. It's the Datadog model of we'll charge you whatever and make it extremely complicated for you to understand why you're being billed $x this month.
Word of advice, if you have unlimited PTO and you've never gotten called into a meeting to tell you you're taking too much you're not taking full advantage. It's probably higher than you think. I've gotten to normal onsie-twosie days off plus 8 full weeks before I got called in.
That was a great year.
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I understand unlimited PTO as no lower limit, as in, there is no limit on how few PTO days you can take.
If you have an actual number, the idea is that you must take them, or at least, you get paid extra if you don't.
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straining is also ambiguous and disingenuous.
if we believe the plan was $200 and the upgrade was to a $2,000 plan.. there's no way a $2,000 user would be "straining" Cloudflare's network.
We spend more than that. If we are putting a strain on Cloudflare, they're not at the scale we think they're at.
Seems like you don't really have any issue with the underlying business decision (ie. pushing a high usage customer to a higher tier plan) and are only upset about the wording the salesperson used. All the points you've made applies to ISPs as well. Most neighborhoods are probably provisioned well enough that a single customer saturating their 1gbit connection isn't going to bring the network down to its knees, but that doesn't mean ISPs aren't justified in pushing such customers to a higher tier offering (eg. dedicated circuit).
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To be honest, sales people are sales people. Their job is to sell you on packages, and they will generally do anything to get you to upgrade.
It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service. They asked you and gave you a "canned" reason.
If you don't mind me asking you had a $200 a month plan, and changed to another provider. Did the plan price go up or down?
If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer.
Except now there isn’t a clear formalization on how much you were expecting to pay or how much runway or patience CF has left for you.
> If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer.
I've had a call from Cloudflare at my previous job, and it wasn't a "you're about to be fired" it was an attempted upsell.
Sales people work within the policies & frameworks set by a sales organizations whose goals and strategies are set by said organizations leadership team.
This isn't a random sales person gone rouge—its a matter of how Cloudflare chooses to do business with and treat their customers.
The problem with this approach for customers is that it makes there costs entirely unpredictable. What's the stop them from increasing prices from $2,000 on the enterprise plan to $20,000 on the enterprise plus plan?
Very true. I think it was Snowflake we worked with recently where the sales rep said they don't get commission (I assume they have other incentives).
Aggressive commission structures, sales targets, and little oversights have visible impacts on how the sales team operate.
Compare to cloud providers like AWS where you certainly get "reminded" constantly about all the integrated services and features but much less so harassed and threatened into closing deals.
If you're not big enough to get an actual contract signed by your legal teams then nothing. That's just how it is, not unique to CF.
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> It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service
They routinely do exactly this
And it's not only threats, they actually enforce them. Here is an example, but there are many more: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
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I actually recommend AWS because of this. Sure, it’s AWS with all the warts, but at least they bend over backwards to maintain compatibility (at least compared to GCP), and have sustainable billing practices.
Free is free until it’s not. When Cloudflare becomes the new Akamai and needs profits, guess who will get squeezed. If you’ve built your app around their vendor specific stuff like Cloudflare functions, that can be bad news.
> If you’ve built your app around their vendor specific stuff like Cloudflare functions, that can be bad news.
There's nothing that "special" about Cloudflare Workers, its mostly "just" a WinterCG runtime. Where you'd encounter problems is if you used the provided interfaces for other adjacent Cloudflare products, like R2, D1, KV, Queues, ect. So what you do is commit a hour of engineering time to make wrapper functions for these APIs. If you're feeling extra spicy, commit another hour of engineering time to make parallel implementations for another service provider. If you allow your tech stack to become deeply intertwined with a 3rd party service provider, thats on you.
Yeah, I guess that’s what I really meant.
Also at face value, it may seem like “an hour of engineering time,” but I think cloud vendor lock in is real unless you try very hard to only use abstract constructs.
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This is a growing pattern in hosting like Netlify and headless CMSs like Sanity. Their free model is "generous" and then if you go production and start to have overages you get billed exorbitantly for bandwidth and API requests. It is essentially a trap. Once you hit those limits you have very little negotiating power when you hit the "call us for pricing" level and you get outrageous quotes. It costs them very little to run these services so if they can net some minnows that become whales, that is almost pure profit.
It's the double-edged sword of both free plans and "transparent pricing". If you just click "buy" and enter your CC info you're subject to their somewhat arbitrary terms of service. Service is cheap and reliable so you don't ask questions. But they can just boot you and there's very little recourse. It's why most big companies want a signed contract that's binding and comes with some kind of mandatory dispute resolution or penalties for non-compliance.
You should report that to them. Their CTO multiple times said this in HN.
I'm not a fan of Cloudflare's enterprise pricing model. It seems like they'll charge you whatever they'd like to when renewal time comes around, and will play with the numbers to ensure you stay around whatever total they'd like to see. They charge for each protected domain, in addition to sane metrics like bandwidth utilization and number of requests. Charging thousands per protected domain per year is scummy. Maybe I'm just too used to AWS/GCloud/et al. pricing that actually bills me on utilization rather than arbitrary metrics.
Did you move from cf to someone else, or are you still using them?
I like Bunny because it’s prepaid
Would you be comfortable sharing how many terabytes you were pushing over their network? Also, how much a similar contract costs with the competition.
While I agree it’s scummy, you could argue you got $1800 worth of traffic for free for a while.