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Comment by tardis_thad | Hacker News Reader

I'd be happy to provide more info but I have none. First I communicated with support which told me that my account was restricted most likely due to 2.8 clause violation (non html content) and suggested to contact with sales which I immediately did.

Sales over the phone (was fastest) told me that it's good I contacted as otherwise in 24hours my account would be fully banned(whatever it means) and that they will prepare me an offer in 15 minutes, but it was taking longer (no response after an hour or so) and in the meanwhile I wrote Twitter and HN post which CTO of Cloudflare noticed and then after a while I've got another phone call from sales that I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account as it was approved now by CTO which I did and that solved the issue at least for now - and that's it - no further info what the issue was, still waiting on Enterprise plan quote for me.

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Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription…

The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.

I've had only limited interaction with their sales people, but find it interesting they weren't on-the-ball trying to sell an account that valuable, either—we were more toward the bottom end of their enterprise range, so I'd just assumed we were too small-potatoes for them, but those were by far the least-hungry sales people I've ever interacted with. It was like I was bothering them. LOL. Also some of them seemed to know very little about their offerings, market segments, et c., which was weird.

[EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.

I agree. I contacted Cloudflare sales for a small order of just a 100k or so per year, and they totally ghosted me after my first round of questions. No quote, no contact, nada.

I gave up and went to Fastly.

You may say my order was too tiny but even Akamai gave a response; they just didn’t have any turn key product that suited my needs.

exact same experience here.

Yeah, CloudFlare was unique among the companies in this space that we contacted. The others' sales folks all gave way more shits, even at fairly big companies where I'm certain we wouldn't be a notably-large account. They were also by far the least-interested in tailoring their plan. "Oh you don't want to pay for this giant pile of stuff you don't need? Hm. Well. Too bad." Seemed like they wanted all-or-nothing, for enterprise plans, which leaves a big gap in their offerings between the top self-serve and the bottom end of enterprise—seems like a pretty major gap in their funnel, letting all those accounts just leave if they exceed self-serve but can't justify the very-expensive minimum enterprise plan, but I guess it's working for them?

Wait they're less reponsive than Akamai ? I ran away from Akamai because of their sales people and how they apparently embedded their dark soul straight into the user interface they give you to use, and by use I mean summon an akamai billing person from the depths because you're not allowed to do anything without them.

I know they're doing good but Cloudflare must be even more successful than I thought if they can afford that level of ineptitude at sales level

Akamai is growing at 7% per year vs 40% per year for Cloudflare. Akamai is still 5x the size of Cloudflare but their growth rate is a lot more manageable than 40%.

Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.

BDR?

Business Development Representative.

Impressively, the expansion conveys about as much information as the acronym.

"Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.

In most companies it's more accurately translated as "lead generator" or "sender of spam emails and LinkedIn messages"

> Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars?

They have someone on the hook with customers hounding them to get their system back online and it isn’t worth spending a few minutes to quote a guaranteed sale?

Something about a bird in the hand comes to mind…

Why wouldn't you do both? And if your sales department is maxed out by chasing the big contracts so much so that they don't have time to onboard someone spending 50k a year, get more sales people.

Unsure how it's "chasing" when people call you. I'm more than a 'warm lead' at that point. I'm calling you wanting to buy your product. And yeah, I know not everyone who calls wants to buy immediately - some are just tire kickers or getting a quote. But... again... it's not 'chasing'. It's not even 'selling' so much as 'order taking', imo.

yeah, any decently set up sales team for any company selling to the whole market ought to have some sort of sales team member that's happy dealing with higher volumes of transactional sales, even if the main focus of most of the team is million dollar accounts, unless their self service programme scales to massive numbers or they don't deal with smaller companies at all.

Someone ringing up to say "I need a quote for this level of usage as I think I'm into your enterprise tier" might be asking for a smaller quote than the Big Fish the BDR has sent a cold email to who's eventually been convinced to take a meeting, but they're more likely to convert and unlikely to take lots of meetings or a particularly skilled salesperson to do it...

I don't disagree, but I've also never seen a enterprise sales organization that caters to businesses that don't already have millions of dollars in spend sitting in the war chest. We'd all jump at 50k because we're reasonable humans that understand thats a lot of money. However, when you're on the hook for booking millions of dollars in business in what amounts to 60 working days (90 day quarters), you might think about it differently is my limited understanding.

That’s all true but the entire point of the freemium model is to feed the paid account sales pipeline… and having a gap between the free and paid tiers where your sales people don’t want to handle the accounts destroys a lot of the purpose of having a free account tier.

I fully agree with what you’re saying but it doesn’t speak well of Cloudflare to have this gap. If they don’t want or handle accounts at this mid tier level, they should have a have a self service tier to handle it.

If that's the case, then they should set up a self-serve portal that these small-time customers can use to buy service if they are too small to warrant talking to an actual human.

But I don't understand why he had to talk to enterprise sales at all if he was already a paying customer, why couldn't he just check a check-box for "High JSON file transfer" and pay an extra fee, then sales could contact him at their leisure to discuss an enterprise contract that might save him money (and they can upsell him on more vendor-lockin services that he'd get with that enterprise contract)

Exactly! I would have bought via self serve or a channel partner but they don’t offer either purchasing option.

Wow. I was just about to code a key part of our startup's platform using workers and durable objects. I had zero idea that workers are intended for html output and that if they were used for JSON-RPC they would ban us if we are too successful. Crazy. The whole point of the service is free egress. What a joke. Pass. Will look into Fastly.

Im on the fence about whether this is accurate. There was an addendum posted somewhere in this thread that clarifies that non-html is just fine.

In reality Im in the same exact position you are and maybe I just want to believe this is something other than that. I dont see why they would care about the content. There has to be something else to this story.

I didn't deploy yet and this has me scared enough to get me thinking about an alternative. Time to spin up a new linode instance I guess.

Sure it’s all fine until an ai or person bans your account for it. It’s cool to talk about what the contract says until you try that and find out their practices implement something else. Unless you plan to sue Cloudflare, the implementation is more important than the contract.

> I should update my ticket to ask unbanning my account

That is a very broken process! Ask the user to change the ticket, so they can do something that they already know is approved? Sales department sounds like a disaster.

doesnt make support out any better though. if i can later just update the ticket myself with "cause the CTO says so" seems sus to say the least

"most likely due to" 2.8 clause violation? So Support wasn't able to say conclusively why your account was restricted?

Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess.

I don't know if this is the case for CF but it seems to be for other businesses.

So the takeaway is “use cloudflare and pray to the ML Gods that things won’t go south?”. Doesn’t sound reassuring. Funnily, in all fields were AI and ML has been involved the QoS has degraded. Like these technologies used to be a marketing trick (we use AI) these days poor QoS is reason to find corps that do not.

> Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess.

I don't think it's usually that they don't know what's going on, but that they don't want to tell you, because they think that's giving away too many details.

I've been flagged in many systems as I move around in the world quite a bit, so sometimes I use a credit card acquired in one country in another, and a couple of days later using it on the other side of the planet, which triggers their anti-fraud systems. Then I write to them and they reply something like "Unfortunately you cannot continue to use our services as your account been flagged as potential fraudulent use. We cannot give you any details because then it'll be easier for fraudulent actors to work around it, so I'm sorry we cannot tell you anything else. Bye."

Normally banks are restricted from explaining why your account was locked. It’s not necessarily their fault.

Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess.

This is why these types of complaints need to be cc:'ed to your congressional representatives in the US or EU representatives elsewhere. No one else can do anything about the root problem of companies that take customers' money and deny any form of accountability.

For every customer who gets lucky on Twitter or HN, there are probably a dozen who end up with no recourse at all.

Rep probably rolled their eyes, said "that's why 99% of the accounts get turned off", and sighed.

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