Cloudflare's sales team and Enterprise pricing model are one of the least effective sales organisations I have encountered in this space. Given the technical nature of their product, it's extremely hard to explain even basic uses of the tool and things like Workers are near impossible to discuss with them. I was really unsurprised to see that OP had a failed Enterprise negotiation with them as I have had the exact same conversation at three different companies now and can imagine perfectly what you were told.
The current offerings of Enterprise and Enterprise Lite simply do not map to the reality of how people use the tool and scale businesses on top of it. I think in part due to Cloudflare's history essentially selling bandwidth and caching, the model is fixated on high binary traffic workloads and simply cannot comprehend the SaaS service model that runs on it and tools like Workers.
This is mostly a rant and hopefully a small +1 signal that this area needs major improvement - but I would also love to hear if anyone else has had interactions with Cloudflare Enterprise and how they found that process?
(Disclaimer: I'm a massive fan of Cloudflare, a user of their products and hold their stock)
https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/examples/return-js...
From the terms
> 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content
> The Services are offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Services solely for the purpose of (i) serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications, including rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) *or other functional equivalents, and (ii) serving web APIs subject to the restrictions set forth in this Section 2.8*. Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service *or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service*. If we determine you have breached this Section 2.8, we may immediately suspend or restrict your use of the Services, or limit End User access to certain of your resources through the Services.
Supplemental terms
> The Cloudflare Developer Platform consists of the following Services: (i) *Cloudflare Workers*, a Service that permits developers to deploy and run encapsulated versions of their proprietary software source code (each a “Workers Script”) on Cloudflare’s edge servers; (ii) Cloudflare Pages, a JAMstack platform for frontend developers to collaborate and deploy websites; (iii) Cloudflare Queues, a managed message queuing service; and (iv) Workers KV, Durable Objects, and R2, storage offerings *used to serve HTML and non-HTML content.*
I can't quite figure out how to parse this such that workers would be deemed unusable to just run an API.
I'd absolutely have gone ahead with using it for an API.
When ever there is non-transparent pricing, it's scary to try and use an infrastructure related service.
The sales teams can't go around saying that you are not a profitable customer, and they can't argue with the marketing team to be more honest about pricing on the pricing page.
So, end result, let's bump of these small free loaders. Large enterprise deals is what gets us the bonus anyways.
I like fly.io pricing in that sense. And I am sure there might be others offering a more transparent pricing, otherwise like me still stuck on AWS.
I just repost the same comment I put in the above thread
> The thing that scary me most is that his business get shut down without any notice period (at least the author not mentioning any previous communications from Cloudflare team about the issue).
> This is really a shitty thing from Cloudflare, you cannot shut down an already running business without any notice/grace period.
"The main issue is not that [COMPANY] is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but that customers feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're small and powerless, you feel that you have no control, and that your issues will go unanswered. What can the average, powerless customer who doesn't have the weight of social media, HN, @dang, or others on their side do when their hard-earned money or business is being held, locked, or otherwise prevented, and when the cause is not fraudulent, or if the customer is unaware of that activity? The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control. It's this feeling of powerlessness that's the issue, regardless of whether or not [COMPANY] is in its rights or doing what it feels is in its and its customers best interests.
What can you do to help empower the powerless customers when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the customer and provide some quick and direct way for the customer to feel empowered?"
Having to resort to HN to get major problems resolved that are major customer service and potential legal / liability issues causes me a lot of stress when I realize that I have don't have nearly the same sort of power or influence as some of the others here do on HN. I worry that my complaints would simply go ignored.
@jgrahamc would love you to comment on what we can do to avoid people having to resort to HN for a solution to these problems, which favors the well-connected and squeaky wheels and disfavors everyone else.
It's not a company I trust to not randomly screw me over out of the blue anymore.
None of Cloudflare's marketing or technical documentation makes any explicit reference to "permitted usages" for Cloudflare services such as R2 and Workers.
This page for example means one thing without any reference to permitted usages and would mean something entirely different if the permitted usages were promoted with the same level of visibility as the benefits.
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/
Nothing here tells me I cannot write my own video serving code with Workers:
https://workers.cloudflare.com/
You might even believe "whatever you need" from this paragraph from the above link:
"Static assets with dynamic power. Say goodbye to build steps which pre-generate thousands of assets in advance. Harness the unrivaled raw power of the edge to generate images, SVGs, PDFs, whatever you need, on the fly, and deliver them to users as quickly as a static asset."
This developer documentation would takes on an entirely new meaning if a link to "acceptable uses" was prominent at the top of each page (not fine print).
https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started/
https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-access/workers-api...
https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/examples/demo-worker/
Have built an entire application around assuming there were no such limitations I now need to rebuild elsewhere.
Humph.
I now no longer even understand what "no egress fees" means - in a way that's worse than the big cloud providers where at least you know they are charging you 9 cents per gigabyte.
In general you can’t trust salespeople and need to get everything in writing. Cloudflare is a prime example of why.
And I’d add in my case because we were keeping track of their promises, we caught them before the sales process completed. It cost them seven figures a year. But maybe it doesn’t matter - their sales approach still has them worth $20 billion.
I asked them to delete my data or provide the Yubi offer and they did neither. So they sit in an email folder known as bad companies. Because my data has value and they lied to obtain it for their own gain (aka fraud).
In Canada we have private prosecution/rules about falsely acquired data. Every bad story on HN puts me closer to opening that folder up and ensuring my data costs at least 100k.
Enough is enough.
If you're on Workers Unbound, you're probably paying closer to ~$800/mo for 4b requests; or if you're on Workers Bundled, then ~2000/mo. What were you quoted for the Enterprise plan? I thought those start at $1500/mo?
Never entirely trust what is said to you to secure/continue a sale, unless you have it written in a contract.
> … "Enterprise wise, that's up to you and you could likely get away with utilising self-serve as you go
… especially if what sales say to you is couched in vague works like “likely to get away with”.
For the CloudFlare people here, this is an upsell opportunity that's being missed. The whole point of the cheap plan is to hook people so they move up. But if you cut them off you can't move them up, duh. You need to rework the sales pipeline for this scenario, obviously.
Given all of this I think we’re going to have to push pause and see how this shakes out.
I use Workers to cache and stream audio. I was under the impression Workers were under a different TOS since the business model is totally different and paid per req.
All I know is to me Cloudflare seems to be a gatekeeper of the worst kind, the kind that blocks me from accessing the content I seek to load.
And the idea that it somehow is protecting the web seems more and more ludicrous each tale like this I read. With each page that is delayed in a loop before finally letting me read it, I become more and more convinced at the sheer uselessness of it. Why does anyone bother with it in the first place when it clearly doesn't actually work and worse can be turned against you at any time?
Or really any service that has it written that they can end your business without notice~
Sounds like an abuse of their terms of service to me.
We upgraded to Enterprise, and had some issues because CF's documentation was not clear (literally a blog post), and their support took many days to even respond and then their response made it clear they hadn't even read the ticket.
I'd move everything into AWS in a second if moving DNS wasn't such a pain.
Also am forced to use the global api token because constantly get rate limited using permission-scoped api tokens -- this is from a simple Terraform plan (first thing in the morning) and after them increasing my rate limit to the max.
I would have never honestly considered serving _html_ from a Worker. I hope we can get an extremely clear statement from Cloudflare on what their policy is.
in my view, the root of the problem is that companies don't have usage limits in place.
they often have 'sort of' usage limits in place -- that is, they don't actually have metrics for their customers' usage, and that leads to these situations.
and these situations are insane resource hogs -- teams of people spending days to try to figure out whether some customer should be bumped up to the next level.
it doesn't happen, then the customer gets cut off.
pretty messed up for Cloudflare to try and destroy a company like that for no reason.
we get these wishy-washy usage/support/sales situations with a lot of ambigous back and forth, and BIGCOMPANY trying to kill _littlecompany_, etc.
set usage limits, when they're surpassed, move the customer to the higher tier, done.
plenty more you can do around the edges, like grace periods, etc. etc., but i feel like this is amateur hour and cruel indifference - in this case, from Cloudflare -- and not the first time we've seen indifference from them, and other BIGTECH companies.
- Is that a good way to get cheap "influencers"?
- Are there companies helping you measuring the potential "outreach" of your customers in case you piss them off?
Pick one!
There are so many questions this leaves unanswered:
- Was this a one-off error in Cloudflare's processes? (These things happen on a big enough scale.)
- Were you violating a specific clause of Cloudflare's T&C? How clear was the clause? What did you do to fix this?
- Was the issue that Cloudflare estimated that you're not paying enough given the bandwidth you're consuming? Did you end up signing up for the Enterprise plan?
Transparency would benefit both Cloudflare (in not making people unnecessarily apprehensive about becoming/remaining a customer) and you (in demonstrating that you're handling this issue in a professional and responsible manner).