Comment by neya

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.