Cloudflare forces consumers onto higher tiers with threats of shutdowns

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Background

Cloudflare is a(n) American based Content Delivery Network (CDN) that focuses on serving content for the world wide web, has taken part in unethical upselling behaviors for their hosting services. Such examples include:

• Users being pitched aggressively to enterprise despite the lack of clear agreement and what would improve
• Users denying the upgrade and then shortly after have sites removed and their account restricted
• Lack of basic business courtesy forcing the customer to bounce around multiple teams (from weeks to months) to resolve a dispute or force bad press for a response
• Shutting down your account and purging your sites if they catch wind on the customers plan on moving to a competitor
• "Imaginative Pricing" telling users the plan they need to use based on how much there willing to spend

Shutdown Paying consumer for rejecting enterprise

Across many incidents involving Cloudflare,^{[citation needed]} used their marketing department will extort their users into paying an excessive amount of cash towards their services, giving vague or otherwise untrustworthy reasons.

In early 2024, Cloudflare persistently pitched Enterprise to one such consumer's company to pay $120k up front for an the plan that the business had no desire to pay for. The decisions pulled by Cloudflare within this entire incident was not handled by a department such as billing or trust and safety, but rather marketing. During the incident, Cloudflare caused considerable unrest and when the business suggested moving to a competitor, they purged all infrastructure for their web services, including DNS records, email infrastructure, and even the website itself. The user who reported on this claimed that this could have been potentially malicious considering the coincidental timing.

While this incident was caused by a TOS breach on the end of the consumer and an overuse of resources from said consumer, as the incident poster claims to work for a casino, Cloudflare's neglect to communicate this breach and a clear reason why they should have been using the enterprise plan, and their haste to push them towards said plan, is a source of concern for consumers.

Cloudflare's response

In a now deleted comment from a Cloudflare employee preserved by another user, they insulted the user reporting on their incident. Claims included TOS breaches and more, despite a lack of any communication beyond their marketing department.

Consumer response

This overreach has scared consumers into leaving Cloudflare, as the web infrastructure they set up has either been damaged by Cloudflare's actions, or are too wary by these actions to desire further using Cloudflare. Both kinds of consumers have both shown outrage towards this incident.

Despite how sparse it is, some news platforms have also covered this incident.