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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Hello, this is the Cloudflare CTO.

In this situation what would you do ?

Would you just spot OP some billing credits to make the account current while sorting out issues ?

While I have a host of projects dependent on AWS and Firebase, I'm always worried about being locked to a vendor. What if a vendor just decides they don't like me, what if I'm not able to migrate...

> What if a vendor just decides they don't like me

Why would that happen? Vendor lockin is a real concern, but worrying that AWS will decide they don't like you is not rational.

No vendor wants to earn a reputation of being that hostile to its own customer base, and so unless you are doing something that is likely going to raise eyebrows you'll be fine.

While I agree with you on principle, Google has earned just that reputation and I would never use Google Cloud for anything critical.

Okay that is a fair point, see Blogger, Stadia, Google Reader etc.

Those aren't example of Google deciding they don't like a specific customer and booting them off the system.

Right, but it was example of why GP would be unlikely to use Google Cloud or recommend Google cloud to others.

This happened to me with Twilio/Sendgrid. I used their email service on all my projects, never a spammer, only transactional. In fact I used it so little that I think they decided I was not worth it. So someday they closed my account. No email, I just noticed I could not login. Contact support and they ask me to provide a bunch of kyc info, it was a very annoying email thread, but basically all my email integrations were broken for no stated reason.

My account had 100% reputation, no billing issues and nothing in my account details was unverifiable.

Then the support rep told me that the account was closed by the system, maybe by mistake, but there was no way to reopen an account so I’d have to signup again and then open a support ticket for that account (I think it was to migrate data, no longer remember).

Annoyed, I try to signup again, open a ticket and the response was:

> We have reviewed your account and have determined that Twilio's services cannot support your account at this time due to one or more of the following:

> 1. Violations of Acceptable Use Policy 2. Violations of Twilio SendGrid Email Policy 3. Accounts with unresolved billing issues 4. Inability to verify provided information

> Thank you for your interest in Twilio SendGrid, best of luck with your future endeavors.

This was from an account with 100% reputation. What I think happened is they were purging low spending accounts. So yes, a company can definitely stop liking you. Gladly I was able to move very quickly to SES.

Did your use case violate 1,2,3,4?

It violated exactly zero of those policies.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Big companies also just make mistakes. They can accidentally ban you and not feel like fixing it.

Have you considered fixing support via Cloudflare instead of offering free diamond tier support to the lucky users whose complaints you read?

My company recently started to offer premium support for more money, how about that?

"Pay 100$ to receive a response within 12 hours!"

"Pay 500$ to receive a response within an hour!"

More money for you, less frustrating and potentially business-ruining outages for customers.

Last example was comically quick to find by the way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=39317352

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