So, Cloudflare Responded...

DO NOT BRIGADE MATT.

I was incredibly disappointed in Cloudflare's "response" to the recent drama, so I felt like I should use my platform to call it out.

If you don't have clear, explicit, PUBLIC pricing, you're in no position to do stuff like this. Genuinely sad to see CF damaging their brand and scaring their users like this.

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[mallninja]

"We're running out of IPv4 addresses & need to move to v6" was a bullet point in my Solaris admin class when I was an instructor for Sun ~30 years ago...

[xpeter]

Optimal situation would have been: "emergency email: your site is being blocked in some countries, which is blocking our customers because you are on a shared IP, since you are not on the enterprise plan. We need a meeting now!". Meeting: "we move you to the enterprise plan. First month for free and within 2 days you need to change the IP-adress".

[jitxhere]

Cloudflare Engineering: 😎😎😎😎
CF Management and Sales: 🤡🤡🤡🤡

Typical Corporate BS

[ryzzlas]

I just don't understand how it's so difficult for companies to just communicate properly to their paying, good customers. Sure, if there's an emergency and everything's burning, it's completely understandable. But in the daily business - eh, makes me wanna move away from those...

[vincenttjia]

LOL, the Cloudflare Zero Trust Access 50 seats is included in the Free plan, so there's no reason for them to include it in that email

[sarjannarwan]

His response shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why what they did was wrong.

It isn't wrong to request higher prices to be paid or to not want to do business with people who could undermine your business.

IT IS wrong to lie or hide what the issue is and punish people for a "crime" they didn't know they committed. It is wrong to call sales for something that was allegedly a trust and safety issue.
It is wrong to have 1 day ultimatums on this type of stuff except where absolutely necessary, but judging by the sales calls it clearly wasn't.

[kaseywahl]

Is this how the Cloudflare PR team (sales) advised them to respond? It's like theyr'e actively assuming the role of the villain.

[Sammysapphira]

Didnt expect to see an osu mention in here
Ppy is a great dev

[jfwfreo]

I suspect all they needed to say is "your site is causing our IP to get blocked in certain jurisdictions, you need to either change to an enterprise plan with a dedicated IP or stop using CloudFlare"

[connoisseurofcookies]

Turns out, throwing the sales team under the bus is just a poor excuse for bad company policy.

[MoonDweller]

There is no free lunch. Yes Akamai and Fastly is much more expensive but I never ever faced anything remotely close to this with them.

[ErazerPT]

The whole place looks like a cesspool tbh... Proper response would just be tech telling them "you're doing this and we can't support that because x, so either stop, extend your plan with feature y, or move to a plan that includes y". Then you get moved to sales and they'd try to do their best to up-sell you on "ish you don't really need", but failing that, just sell you the bare minimum you need. As it went, it just screams "we suck from the top down, we don't have your best interest or your back in mind and we'll go down whatever shady route we have to to make money". Talk about blasting your value into oblivion...

[Maverrick]

well ... this reminds me a bit of the unity meltdown .. people wont switch away in an instant .. but there will be a lot of soulsearching before cloudflare gets a new customer .. and now they probably put a lot more research in regarding competitors.

[wlockuz]

At this point itt clearly shows their MO: "If you're anywhere below the Enterprise plan, you're not worth the hassle for us."

[jack.smith]

Why the hell would you even use a CDN to only cache HTML files? The entire idea is to put media (or .js bundles) closer to the client. AWS CloudFront has no issues with this either.

[KosherCoder]

I was considering moving our 31 domains to them. Not anymore. Thanks for this video.

[brainites]

These videos will save my reputation a lot. As a creature who has been building for companies to avoid vendor lock-in, I was considering cloudflare stuff before this. Not again.

[zCrabOG]

Its like that dude in the project group where you ask, hey how's it going with the task? And he just says its going great for 4 weeks. And then after 4 weeks it turns out he hasn't done shit.

Just please communicate and say something if you have issues.

[trumpetbob]

Maybe it is just me, but if Cloudflare is claiming some legal violation, I'd expect at least one lawyer from Cloudflare in the meeting they demanded the customer quickly agree with to discuss it.

[doresearchstopwhining]

Damn, I was a loyal customer, investor, and huge advocate of CF before this all happened. Now I am making plans to reverse course on all of these things. Some of the scummiest corporate BS I have seen in this industry.