Cloudflare: Pay Me 120k Or We Shut You Down

If I heard "pay us 120k in 24 hours or your business shuts down" then I'd be on a call with legal first thing.

"Unlimited" traffic until they decide you've used too much.

Its crazy how they made me feel bad for an online casino

That one guy in the comments: "Leave the multi-billion dollar company alone!!"

I can totally confirm this is their behaviour from my own personal experience. It's scary bad that they get away with it tbh.

If they were doing something against TOS, then the solution shouldn't be, pay us more, instead it should be immediate ban (for everybody abusing the TOS) or listing which parts of TOS are violated and deadline to fix those issues.

Racketeering is just the merging of “Trust and Safety” with “Sales”

I believe it 100%. We have been in similar situation with our former domain/mail/web hosting provider. They got sold, then they changed pricing without announcements, after a while they blocked our account (again with no prior announcements) and demanded from us to cough up the money. DO NOT LET YOUR HOSTING PROVIDER BE YOUR DOMAIN REGISTRAR! Diversify!

There is no excuse for this level of sales team extortion attempts and outright deleting stuff. If gambling is against the TOS, you don't try to extort more money but tell them that they have two weeks to find another provider.

If I received that email I would assume it was a scam. Nebulous about what the actual problem is, call to urgency, do this now or else.

I would bet (haha) that such a behavior is illegal in many jurisdictions. Claiming violations of the TOS and making problems going away by paying more and then terminating a service they paid for when they refused… it’s so obvious whats going on.

Pretty wild that business ethics are so bad in the US that people are seriously accept "be ready to shift your hole company in 24hrs" as a normal solution.

If they lose 10 customers but successfully convert 1 to enterprise they are still coming out ahead. Hell, if they lose 20:1 they are still ahead at those prices.

Oracle sales techniques. I'd not be surprised if a new sales guy coming from that school.

This appears to be a breach of contract on cloudflare’s behalf. Also, with the business plan which includes SLA uptime insurance, it seems that cloudflare would actually owe this client a lot of money for the damages caused by their reckless actions, independent of the breach of contract which would include significant damages. So they’re going to have to show the client breaking their terms of service using the wrong plan for their business, the legal basis of which seems shaky, and could set precedent for business practices like this. Consumer protection type matters. Short notice + financial damages + inconsistent application of terms is usually a recipe for a smack down.

Vendor lock-in is the devil. Can't trust anyone, it's just too easy to "lock-in and extort" as a business plan. Always have a fallback plan to spring into action at a moment's notice.

FTC should be getting in on this, the fake "unlimited" on the business plan is straight up false advertising. In general the cloud services market, specifically IaaS where it's purely commoditized compute/storage/networking, is full of anti-competitive behavior. Would love to see some trust busting soon

I don’t get how the immediate response to being on a call with sales isn’t ’I’m sorry, we have our technician experts on this call. If you want to discuss sales, that’s a different team.’

Trust and Safety sounds like homelander saying Thoughts and prayers.

This gives me a business idea: make a company where every department is actually the sales team. The customers will be sold the privilege to sold more things by the sales team under a different name. What could possibly go erong?