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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, sales people are sales people. Their job is to sell you on packages, and they will generally do anything to get you to upgrade.

It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service. They asked you and gave you a "canned" reason.

If you don't mind me asking you had a $200 a month plan, and changed to another provider. Did the plan price go up or down?

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If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer.

Except now there isn’t a clear formalization on how much you were expecting to pay or how much runway or patience CF has left for you.

> If CF is calling you like this then I’m not sure how you’re interpreting this as a donation call. They’re basically saying you’re about to be fired as a customer.

I've had a call from Cloudflare at my previous job, and it wasn't a "you're about to be fired" it was an attempted upsell.

Sales people work within the policies & frameworks set by a sales organizations whose goals and strategies are set by said organizations leadership team.

This isn't a random sales person gone rouge—its a matter of how Cloudflare chooses to do business with and treat their customers.

The problem with this approach for customers is that it makes there costs entirely unpredictable. What's the stop them from increasing prices from $2,000 on the enterprise plan to $20,000 on the enterprise plus plan?

If you're not big enough to get an actual contract signed by your legal teams then nothing. That's just how it is, not unique to CF.

Sure but there's a huge difference between companies that load the call with sales people and sell to execs vs bringing solutions architects and sales/customer engineers on the call and actually explaining the product and its benefits and coming up with a customer tailored solution.

We had a pretty positive experience with a Cloudflare contract last year but it sounds like Cloudflare is more the former than the latter.

Very true. I think it was Snowflake we worked with recently where the sales rep said they don't get commission (I assume they have other incentives).

Aggressive commission structures, sales targets, and little oversights have visible impacts on how the sales team operate.

Compare to cloud providers like AWS where you certainly get "reminded" constantly about all the integrated services and features but much less so harassed and threatened into closing deals.

> It's not like they threatened to remove you from their service

They routinely do exactly this

And it's not only threats, they actually enforce them. Here is an example, but there are many more: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...

This org was getting Cloudflare owned IPs blocked left & right due to the gambling content.

The fees are for sure ridiculous but i don't think Cloudflare was wholly unreasonable to request that the customer bring their own IP.

Is it written anywhere in their ToS that “gambling content” requires you to pay 120k$ or get booted out? If not, then it's not reasonable at all to give them a 24-hour notice and it definitely sounds like extortion.

I don't buy the “was getting Cloudflare owned IPs blocked left & right” argument.

Remember we are talking about a platform that still protects 4chan despite the internet raids, violence threats, celebrity hacking + photos leak, the buffalo shooting, etc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies_and_harass...

Surely there are abuse and fair use provisions in their ToS/contract for shared resources like IPs. If they're in the xx percentile of customers causing IP blocks they'd enforce.

Industry practice is to just move all the risky customers in an IP range dedicated to them

Yes, Cloudflare does that but they don't hand out blocks of dedicated IPs to low paying customers. IIRC you need to be on a contract instead of a monthly plan which is typically a big price increase.

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