Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h
robindev.substack.com
TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):

This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.

I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•6 months ago

      $0 is better than having a customer whose costs exceed their revenue; it looks like the bad press is being managed; and also fuck online casinos very much.

      • @[email protected]English
        25•6 months ago

        Just because you don’t like online casinos, doesn’t mean cloudflare didn’t completely fuck this up. They could have negotiated reasonable terms to increase their revenue on this account instead of going the route of stonewalling and extortion.

        So not only did they lose this customer, but this bad press will ensure a lot of others never sign up with them, potentially costing them millions in foregone sales.

        Yeah this was a massive boondoggle…

        • tedu
          -10•6 months ago

          Are these millions of potential customers in the room with us?

          • @[email protected]English
            7•6 months ago

            If they’re charging $120,000 per client, it only takes 17 potential lost customers to constitute “millions.” It’s realistic that at least 17 companies might be put-off with the way this was handled.