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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Is Cloudflare requiring you to switch to Enterprise plans if your usage is above some threshold? In a previous discussion on HN about Cloudflare, a good half dozen people replied saying they got calls when their usage increased above some level that they had to switch to an enterprise plan, and AFAIK those start at $5K/month (from a brief talk with sales a few weeks ago).

We have tens of TB in AWS that we'd like to move to CF, but I'm reluctant to without being able to know if we're going to get a call demanding we switch to enterprise.

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I specifically asked this question to Sales and they told me no. There probably isn't an official policy and it's up to the discretion of the people involved. In my case I had 100 MB of data on S3 that I was serving to a lot of users (250 TB - 500 TB of egress per month). This is free for me on R2 because you aren't billed for requests served from cache and we have a 100% cache hit rate. I was very up front about this to sales and they said they didn't care as long as we paid for some kind of support package. We were paying for the $20/mo plan but later elected to upgrade to the $200/mo plan. Not a bad deal since the data transfer from AWS alone was more than $20,000.

I don't want to take advantage of them and get on their abuse list since this is production. I'm happy to pay more! I just don't want to deal with negotiating an Enterprise plan. They ask you so many questions like "how many Page Rules do you want? How many Worker requests?" I just want R2. And this response confuses them too because they say "well R2 is pay-what-you-use..." I would honestly be happier with a $5000/mo "excessive R2 bandwidth" fee. But they don't seem to want to implement that.

$5k/month is just Cloudflare's opening bid. In Enterprise sales, you are expected to negotiate for a discount. Common rule of thumb is that Enterprise sales (in general, across vendors) start at ~$2k/month (this is what's necessary to pay for salespeople's salaries) and savvy negotiators will end up close to that figure for bare-bones plans.

In what world does 2k/month pay a sales persons salary? And what enterprise sales person is OK selling something for $2k/month/$24k/year when they carry a quota 20-50x that amount?

Enterprise deals start at 100-200k/year, minimum, IME.

So cloudflare quotes him $5k so that’s 60k. You’re already wrong there.

Then your 24k a year sales person number is assuming that the sales person will sell one license the entire year, an insane assumption.

> what enterprise sales person is OK selling something for $2k/month/$24k/year when they carry a quota 20-50x that amount

probably someone who spends no more than one man-week on this sale, which doesn't seem that hard if the customer is a small org and only wants to buy one feature? sure, if you expect to spend months negotiating and years implementing, you'll need to charge a lot to make up for the time, but we're not talking about that case here.

I'm not including some full Solutions Engineer / Customer Success Engineer kind of integration work on part of the vendor - I'm talking about, you go to the vendor's website, you see some feature you need (like SSO) is under "Contact Us" pricing, usually the barebones for that is $2k/month. This represents meeting with Sales for 15 minute calls a handful of times so they can qualify you, understand your usecase, present you with a quote for more than you need, then negotiate down.

Enterprise salespeople working in that segment understand you're small-fry and they'll kick you a small contract not because they're going to get rich off the commission but because they know that depending solely on whales is a high-risk approach that sooner or later gets them fired. Small contracts pad them out and provide more reliable monthly numbers as long as the sales process doesn't turn into a tarpit that isn't worth the money.

Data point: They call you once you hit 300TB egress per month on a _free_ tier and ask to start paying (nothing wrong with that, just a data point).

I’ve reached 500 TB a month at one point but never had any issue. Perhaps an email I ignored but nothing went down.

Is that on the free tier or one of the paid tiers like the $60/mo or $200/mo?

Free tier

Yes. They called a company i worked for, we used a lot of data. They gave us a few weeks to move off (what we needed).

Do not think its free for all usage.

AFAIK R2 is priced completely separately on a pay as you use basis. Have you got a link to these replies?

I've done some searching around, but can't seem to find the thread where this came up. It was in the replies to some HN post, and there were 4-5 top level comments all saying the same thing. Wish I would have bookmarked it or something.

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