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.
As they stated in the article, they were fully open to them calling out anything that was against the ToS, but CF never explained to them what was wrong, or how they could rectify it. They attempted multiple meetings with them to try to figure out what was the culprit, but cloudflare hit them with a 120k/month bill insisting it was necessary and never telling them why.
Clouflare fucked up in multiple ways:
That and also, what company of that scale can you just go to finance and be like “Hey Cloudflare just jacked up our rate from $250/mo to $10000/mo and they want the whole 120k for the whole year right now and we need it done within 24h or they’ll cut us off”. Even for companies spending a million a month on AWS costs that’s 12% of the budget.
And also asking it all upfront, like, what? What happened to monthly billing? What company has the money to pay infrastructure bills yearly like that, especially on such notice?
Large companies have big cash flows, they don’t have 120k just laying around, it’s tied in some assets somewhere especially with the inflation, having large amounts of plain cash is bad finances. They probably need to take out a loan or sell some stocks or whatever. You can’t do that in 24h.
I have no doubt the author is omitting important details in the story, they may have been getting warnings for a while at this point and they just ignored them because “we’re happy with our business plan”. But the whole upfront part, then terminating the account as soon as they expressed looking at competitors pricing which is absolutely normal to want to do when your bill goes up 40x, if not required by company policy. Shady as fuck from Cloudflare.
just want to add in theory there are legitimate reasons to cancel other than legal, e.g. customers system is compromised and must be taken off to stop the attacker.
Fair, but then communication is key. They should have been extremely clear “This is what’s happening, you have X time to rectify it or we will need to take drastic steps”
Legal is the only one I can think of that would mean radio silence from CF, for example if they were hosting illegal content and the feds were building a case. Seeing how it was all coming from sales and they were pushing for a massive chunk of money all of a sudden I doubt that was what was happening.