Comment by gruez

Comment by gruez 3 days ago

>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.

vvillena 3 days ago

Well, Cloudflare seems pretty cagey about what their prices are, given they don't reveal them to clients until they are completely tied in.

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neya 2 days ago

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.

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Sammi 2 days ago

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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- neya 2 days ago
  
  > everyone promising "unlimited" will still have a point where you are just costing them too much
  I mean, in the business world, if you promise someone something, it has legal consequences, you can't just walk in and say "hey, remember I promised you something unlimited with no strings attached? Yeah, no"
  That's exactly my problem with CF. It's not like we are a large news network or anything. We are actually very small compared to their other customers, that much I can tell you.
  
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bogwog 3 days ago

I've seen enough stories exactly like this from other CF customers to believe it.

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gruez 3 days ago

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=40482505, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640016, 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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- snowwrestler 3 days ago
  
  On the one hand it’s completely reasonable for a business to ask customers to pay for what they are getting.
  On the other hand, this entire HN thread was kicked off by a blog post gushing about how awesome it is that Cloudflare offers truly unlimited bandwidth for free.
  I’ve been around the industry long enough to understand that anything marketed as free and unlimited is in fact a loss leader. But I also am fine with pointing out this obvious contradiction between marketing and reality.
  
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  tomnipotent 3 days ago
  
  > offers truly unlimited bandwidth for free
  Free of charge is different from free of restrictions. Cloudflare didn't trick anyone into signing up for these plans, and it's never been a secret that they're a for-profit company.
  > contradiction between marketing and reality
  I think the important distinction is contradiction between expectations and reality. Cloudflare free plan's outside of Pages have never offered "unlimited free bandwidth" but "generous free bandwidth with conditions". It just so happened that for many the "generous" was unlimited, and this precedence somehow convinced everyone that "free plan" meant "unlimited free bandwidth" instead of "generous free bandwidth with conditions".
  I'm with parent in the feeling that most the stories of Cloudflare acting in bad faith end up being the customer up to shady shit but expecting Cloudflare to subsidize them because "free plan". I'd be genuinely curious to read about an incident where I didn't side with Cloudflare.
  Separate to this issue is that their Sales team employ strategies that the engineering crowd considers distasteful like phone calls, pressure tactics and private pricing. Most engineers never need to talk to a sales person outside retail, so it's a shock when you're suddenly talking to one trained and incentivized to exploit more from larger clients but is instead using those tactics on you. It's unsettling if you're not familiar with it, and leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
  
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sergiotapia 3 days ago

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.

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Spivak 3 days ago

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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- nusl 2 days ago
  
  Do you think "unlimited leave" policies end up acting a bit like insurance models? Some people take a lot, many take a little, so it evens out to less-than-if-we-had-a-set-number-of-days?
  
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GuB-42 2 days ago

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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- bigfatkitten 2 days ago
  
  > 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.
  That's why "unlimited" PTO exists. Defined PTO is a liability on the company's books.
  
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[removed] 3 days ago

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rovr138 3 days ago

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.

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gruez 3 days ago

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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- BoorishBears 3 days ago
  
  Why are you straining so hard and spending so many words to defend general scumminess.
  Invisible limits are an anti-pattern, simple as that.
  
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  gruez 3 days ago
  
  See my other comment[1]. I'm not sure why you're straining so hard and spending so many words to defend "general scumminess", like the the right of a gambling site hosting dozens of domains (to evade government bans) on shared cloudflare IPs, or people expecting to get 1.2PB of bandwidth served out of a $200 CDN plan.
  [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42717005
  
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