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Comment by dismantlethesun | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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%.

exact same experience here.

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