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Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts.

Cloudflare's enterprise customer acquisition strategy seems to be offering free or extremely cheap flat-rate plans with "no limits", then when a customer gets a sizeable amount of traffic they will try to sell them an enterprise plan and cut them off if they don't buy (see https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...). IMO this is pretty shrewd, as it means that companies can't do real price comparisons between Cloudflare and other CDNs until they already have all their infrastructure plugged into Cloudflare.

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That particular story / case had a lot more context to it that we weren't given. I wouldn't be ready to place any kind of merit on it without hearing more. I also think given the OP's industry it's likely there were issues with IP reputation. Could it have been handled differently? Probably. In this case I think it would have been smarter to just part ways upfront and let the client know it's not going to work out. I suspect the contract was designed to say.. we don't see the value in this relationship.. but at this price we'll make it work type deal. I don't think that's the right way to go, but I hardly believe this is how they operate.

I've used their free -> enterprise services in multiple companies and clients. Haven't had a single bad experience with them yet. Always helpful, if a bit delayed at times.

It doesn't seem like Cloudflare has any problems with online gambling, especially since the first email the author got from Cloudflare came from someone in their "Gaming & iGaming" division. There's people in this thread in other industries who have had similar experiences with them.

IMO the biggest problems are how Cloudflare kept inventing excuses like "issues with account settings" to get the customer on the phone with their sales team, and the mixing of "trust and safety" with sales (like deleting their account for ToS violations after the CEO mentioned talking to a competing CDN).

I don't know that I can trust the perspective of the Op here. Gaming and Gambling aren't the same thing. We don't know that they invented excuses here either. I would also suspect the comment about a competing CDN was used by the OP to try and gain leverage and it failed.

All i'm saying is we can't make a determination of right and wrong without more data. All things considered, it reads more to me that the data withheld is on the original OP side rather than the CF side.

Either way, it's a unique one off. Most of the mentions in this thread of this behavior all rely on this one experience. I think that in of itself is probably a positive on the side of cloudflare. If it were institutional that they treat clients like this we would hear it regularly.

> Gaming and Gambling aren't the same thing.

iGaming is a euphemism for online gambling.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/slt3lc6tev37/4SyI8LW6SeJAGPWwZY...

Interesting, thanks for the link to the asset too.

Gambling is often just refered to as "gaming" by the industry and legal system, so the word is like "drinking" in that it's both specific and non-specific depending on context. English is a very well thought out language.

No problem with gaming & gambling where it’s legal. Lots of problems where 1) it’s illegal; and 2) a customer sets up lots of free accounts to get around local ISP blocks and gets big ranges of our IPs blocked causing significant collateral damage to other customers who share the IPs. In that case we will ask the customer to switch to a solution which requires them to bring their own IP addresses. And because that takes much more bespoke support, we charge for it.

Yep, and if you contact their sales directly because you've been bitten before and tell them your traffic they will be happy to tell you that yes, other than a short trial you have to pay them for huge bandwidth from month one. It's actually surprising to me people would believe it's fully free. Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt immediately.

Like think for a bit that if that was the case Netflix would just move to Cloudflare free tier and Cloudflare would go bankrupt immediately.

Cloudflare's free tier specifically excludes video. See https://www.cloudflare.com/service-specific-terms-applicatio...:

Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business) Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.

Replace Netflix with Reddit in that hypothetical then, would they be allowed to serve their substantial non-video traffic through the free tier? If so, you have to wonder why they choose to pay for Fastly instead.

Yes, and they are free to talk to us any time if they want to switch; I doubt they'd want to be on a free plan because there are significant extras that come with the paid plans.

We’d be happy to support Reddit on our free tier. I doubt we’d actually be able to measure the increase in bandwidth costs if they were to onboard.

Does this apply to caching R2 with the free tier CDN?

The R2 overview page explicitly lists "Storage for podcast episodes", but a podcast host under the free tier would serve a disproportionate percentage of audio files.

Audio is tiny compared to video (and even images), especially for podcasts, think ~1MB/minute. And they compress well if you want them to be smaller. High quality video (think 4K HDR) can quite comfortably be over 1MB per second.

I assume they don't want to become a file sharing website, but hosting a podcast is relatively easy on the bandwidth requirements.

A music album which gives an hour of entertainment might be distributed in lossless form at a size of 300 MB or so. A similar length TV episode could be between that and 1 GB. Podcasts are usually way lower quality and much smaller.

A lot of people who had large image collections (like myself) online struggled with revenue relative to cost circa 2012, I saw a lot of sites I respected go down, though we did see some new style social sites such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Somehow YouTube was doing much better in terms of revenue/cost with video.

Compressing images for the web is not at all trivial, I over-compressed a few million images and really regretted it. When I post to social now I use Photoshop's "(Legacy) Save for web" which has a nice slider for the quality level and find I can get images I take with my Sony to look like they came from a pro camera between 80kb (small flower, blurry background) to 800kb. I see huge splash images on blogs that are smaller, they make a good first impression, look close and the blocking is awful.

It's been asked and answered many times. https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/service-specific-terms-deve...

ctrl+f "podcast" has no results

It's treated (along with the big one, video) under non-html content

Well bad example, but as someone else said, replace with any other large non video service. I'm not making this up, I had calls with sales. And like I said, I don't think this is surprising, it's like "infinite bandwidth" deals from ISPs and phone data plans, etc. It's a reasonable expectation that you'd have to pay at some threshold.

Frankly it’s none of y’alls beeswax what medium of content I’m deploying. I can understand restrictions on illegal and offensive content. I won’t be using Cloudflare if including a file or even putting some base64 in my html file will be a ToS violation.

It's these petty restrictions that make these pricing policies convenient, and it hurts the market :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) https://pricecontrol.biz/en/dumping-from-a-to-z/

Wouldn't a significant restriction on what you can host for free move it further from being dumping? I don't understand your logic.

No, if they had to be more consistent with the rules this type of dumping wouldn’t be as effective.

What's inconsistent about allowing web pages but not video?

If they had a limit of 50MB average per page navigation, would you call that rule consistent? It would have largely the same effect and I don't think it would affect the ease of dumping.

What about hosting video on R2 and using the CDN?

I haven't heard about this in particular but based entirely on your depiction here it sounds more like fraud to me.

If I was paying a flat rate for a no limit plan, that company tried to sell me an Enterprise plan which I declined, then they cut me off, we'd be in court as soon as the clerk would schedule it.

If you were rotating IPs against the TOS I don't think you'd have a leg to stand on

The GP doesn't mention anything about rotating IPs

I think he is saying that the customer, a casino. Had a dubious legal status in different countries. They are often banned.

Cloudflare doesn't want their IP's (rotating) to be affected so advised bring your own IP, which is an Enterprise feature.

I remember this story and it missed the entire point.

The customer ( a casino) was using dubious actions in different countries which impacted Cloudflare's IP trust. Tldr: Cloudflare didn't want an IP ban in their IP's due to government regulation.

The fix was to bring their own IP which is an Enterprise feature, as they weren't allowed to use Cloudflare's IPs anymore.

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