Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help | Hacker News Reader

Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help

146 pointsthekonqueror29 comments

I signed up for Cloudflare's Business plan and paid for a year in advance. While adding a new domain I made a typo and now the subscription is stuck in a limbo.

I can't change the domain without contacting their support or paying another $2400. When I open a support ticket, their portal shows 'Unable to find your account' and tells me to open another support request for it.

All support tickets are closed automatically by their "AI" which points to the same article that says open a ticket.

Is shaming them on Twitter my only option left?

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One of the things I was most surprised about recently is just how buggy and unpleasant to use the Cloudflare dashboard is. We only moved to them recently and I was really shocked. I had one situation where the dashboard literally showed me the wrong domain but rules for another, which I think was a session or caching bug. I really thought it would be better for a company that size!

You'd be surprised... I did a LOT of cleanup work for a private college that had a lot of "clever" developers that didn't understand static variables in C#, or how the ASP.Net lifecycle worked. Race conditions and all kinds of weird errors when the system got busy. Not to mention a lot of "fun" performance issues.

Just because someone has a CS degree doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing.

That's different, those are clever people who are bad developers. But too proud to admit it even to themselves. You come across them a lot in small/mid sized companies and non-tech IT teams.

Cloudflare's no longer the darling of HN, but they unquestionably have clever people who are excellent developers. Just maybe not excellent at web dev and cache invalidation by the sound of it.

My main point is, you can be working with people that are pretty smart and well educated, with a pretty good baseline understanding of theory but that doesn't always mean they have the actual experience and/or thorough enough understanding of a given set of tooling and environment to implement correctly.

I say this as someone who is autodidactic (self-taught) with regards to software engineering. I never stop learning, reading, experimenting and just gaining as much understanding over everything I touch as I can. My mind doesn't always work like most people. And my statements are not meant to be insulting, just my point of view from the outside...

In that, I feel that a lot of FAANG (whatever the correct/current conflation is) tend to rely on a lot of focus that tends to favor those with a formal education, and those closer to that education (less experienced outside school). In practice, my experience is that this will lead to an excess in "Enterprise Pattern" usage as well as unnecessary complexity which leads to an increased risk of error.

Yeah, I constantly get dashboard errors and weird things I have to track down in the browser console to troubleshoot.

At one point I didn't have proper access to something, but instead of getting a message saying that, I got some generic 500 error.

> Is shaming them on Twitter my only option left?

Shaming them on here works better, if you get to the frontpage then their CEO or CTO will probably show up to defuse the situation.

Fingers crossed!

@eastdakota (CEO)

@jgrahamc (former CTO, now board member)

Their CEO is notorious for replying to “normal” people. I’ve emailed him a few things and to my surprise he replied to my email. Which is a good thing!

This would be an excellent use of small claims court; you want paid-for service provided and they’re giving you the phone-tree runaround. The court would prefer a settlement be reached before trial and their legal team will have no trouble bypassing their support AI to get a ticket opened.

Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court.

Had a similar situation happen with another company. Went to take them to small claims but the judge threw it out because of the arbitration clause. We then spent months and many resources but were unable to continue because we couldn't successfully contact their arbitrator to proceed with the dispute. Long story short, we wrote it all off as it was becoming too expensive both with time and resources.

This is all by design, and admittedly, a clever way for companies to do what they do.

> Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court.

They can only enforce that contractual agreement IF THEY SHOW UP TO COURT. Which costs them money, which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.

In your case you wanted a cash settlement. In OP's case they want a resolution. Apples Vs. Oranges.

edit: Looks like someone at Cloudflare responded to OP's issue below anyway.

> which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.

Precisely this. It isn’t always about getting your whole day in court; sometimes it’s just about getting a human to intervene at all.

That said, arbitration would be just as acceptable as small claims court here. Either way, legal will see the petition and escalate internally. Arbitration costs a lot more than having someone open a support ticket, especially if your complaint says in plain language:

“This is solely to get a human to tech support my problem because I’m trapped in a phone tree loop that won’t let me file a support ticket. I plan to withdraw my complaint as soon as a human being engages with the technical issue preventing me from contacting support, so I can resume spending my money on Cloudflare.”

(Notice that this is careful not to demand a resolution to the issue. That’s really important.)

Hi. I am sorry about this issue. Can you email dane@cloudflare.com, and it will get resolved? I am also working on more systematic fixes for when customers get into this situation.

The more systematic fix is to make paying customers speak with actual humans, rather than buggy AI

Very strongly agreed. I can count on no hands the number of times I've contacted a company for support and had any interest in talking to AI. Indeed, the chatbots I've interacted with have all been so comically bad that I wondered if these companies were deliberately trying to frustrate me.

Escalating to a human in a time-appropriate manner seems like what people are asking for.

Thanks, email sent.

Thanks Dane!

Weird how support suddenly answers questions when the tickets become public.

Namecheap support immediately refunded when I mentioned them I made a typo in the domain i bought.

That's great. I don't even want to change a domain registration, just need to add an existing domain to Cloudflare.

That's wild! Hopefully someone at Cloudflare sees this and can help you out

> All support tickets are closed automatically by their "AI" which points to the same article that says open a ticket.

Maybe just have a script follow this infinite loop?

I have a leak in my ceiling and my landlord doesnt even answer my texts anymore. I feel you.

Post it on some social media like X , linkedin, or Bluesky The Cloudflare team might contact you soon!

They might not care HN, which I dont know

They are more responsive on the Discord channel. I've talked with a few of their support people and am hardly a paying user.

You should ask an AI to help you file a chargeback.

ask and tell them on twitter maybe that will help u.

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