Yikes. The tactics by their Sales team are so ridiculously ugly, I’m going to get our team to contact competitors (even though we’re already on Enterprise). We’re paying slightly more for same traffic so clearly they just pluck numbers out of their asses. Ops leadership were experienced with CF so it wasn’t a big decision (price was kind of irrelevant anyway).
Yeah, that’s alarming to me as someone who architects solutions for companies myself. Under no circumstance (unless idk the client in question is somehow in legal trouble like serving csam or something horrible, and that’s clearly not the case here since they’re going for more money) should an account be taken offline that quickly. They knew this would cause downtime and they did it anyway
Most companies would shut your shit down for TOS violations and then maybe allow you to reach their legal/finance to figure out how to offboard your ass. Two weeks was more than fair.
Especially a TOS violation that isn’t a violation in the more expensive package. It’s clearly a tactic to kick out customers who cost them too much.
We also have a free tier and a cheap entry SKU but we don’t strong arm people to upgrade. CF clearly price their cheap tier and set the features in an unsustainable way that leads them to have to force customers up to Enterprise because the customer costs more to host than the customer pays.
That isn’t the customer’s fault. Fix your SKUs; fix your pricing, feature set, and thresholds.
To effectively wipe a customers access, ability to see logs, custom rules, and more, is wrong.
When one of our customer’s licenses expiries, no functionality breaks for something like 3 to 6 months (depending on size) and the core product offering continues to work in perpetuity (as we’d rather they keep using it than suddenly be without it and on older versions).
If CF cut us out like they did this casino, 100s millions of people would be impacted. You could be sure as hell we’d immediately go and be a case study for a competitor about how to migrate painlessly from CF and our customers would be aware what org fucked us over and put them all at risk.
Especially a TOS violation that isn’t a violation in the more expensive package. It’s clearly a tactic to kick out customers who cost them too much.
it’s because the cheaper tiers share IPs with literally every other CF customer. Of course it’s more expensive to not do that, it has nothing to do with trying to make a sale.
This is how I view it. Even if they were doing it maliciously, it is still a company and cloud flare should make the assumption they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. Tell them it’s actually not allowed, that you just caught it, and give a clear (reasonable) timeline on getting to compliance.
Yikes. The tactics by their Sales team are so ridiculously ugly, I’m going to get our team to contact competitors (even though we’re already on Enterprise). We’re paying slightly more for same traffic so clearly they just pluck numbers out of their asses. Ops leadership were experienced with CF so it wasn’t a big decision (price was kind of irrelevant anyway).
Thank you for flagging this, OP.
Yeah, that’s alarming to me as someone who architects solutions for companies myself. Under no circumstance (unless idk the client in question is somehow in legal trouble like serving csam or something horrible, and that’s clearly not the case here since they’re going for more money) should an account be taken offline that quickly. They knew this would cause downtime and they did it anyway
Most companies would shut your shit down for TOS violations and then maybe allow you to reach their legal/finance to figure out how to offboard your ass. Two weeks was more than fair.
Especially a TOS violation that isn’t a violation in the more expensive package. It’s clearly a tactic to kick out customers who cost them too much.
We also have a free tier and a cheap entry SKU but we don’t strong arm people to upgrade. CF clearly price their cheap tier and set the features in an unsustainable way that leads them to have to force customers up to Enterprise because the customer costs more to host than the customer pays.
That isn’t the customer’s fault. Fix your SKUs; fix your pricing, feature set, and thresholds.
To effectively wipe a customers access, ability to see logs, custom rules, and more, is wrong.
When one of our customer’s licenses expiries, no functionality breaks for something like 3 to 6 months (depending on size) and the core product offering continues to work in perpetuity (as we’d rather they keep using it than suddenly be without it and on older versions).
If CF cut us out like they did this casino, 100s millions of people would be impacted. You could be sure as hell we’d immediately go and be a case study for a competitor about how to migrate painlessly from CF and our customers would be aware what org fucked us over and put them all at risk.
it’s because the cheaper tiers share IPs with literally every other CF customer. Of course it’s more expensive to not do that, it has nothing to do with trying to make a sale.
This is how I view it. Even if they were doing it maliciously, it is still a company and cloud flare should make the assumption they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. Tell them it’s actually not allowed, that you just caught it, and give a clear (reasonable) timeline on getting to compliance.