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 concerning 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]} they used their marketing department as a tool to force their users into paying a large sum of cash towards their services, giving vague or otherwise untrustworthy reasons, such as breaching an arbitrary traffic limit, despite marketing towards consumers that they have unlimited bandwidth.

In early 2024, Cloudflare persistently pitched their Enterprise plan to one such consumer's company, demanding payment of $120,000 up front. While it was discovered later that this was due to a breach of Cloudflare's Terms of Use, as Casinos and other legally questionable websites are required to provide their own IP via their BYOIP service, there was a lack of clear communication towards the consumer to do so. During attempts to contact other departments of Cloudflare, such as Billing and Trust and Safety, the Marketing department persistently overtook handling the case, even causing tickets to be hastily closed.

This caused a considerable amount of unrest for the business, and shortly after the consumer's business mentioned intending to switch to a competitor over the situation, Cloudflare purged all infrastructure for the consumer's web services, including DNS records, email infrastructure, and even the website itself. The user who reported on this claimed that this was malicious considering the coincidental timing. Commenters on the article and other consumers are however mixed on this theory, especially as the author's admissions to working for an online casino has influenced some negative bias.

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 breaching traffic limits, the Terms of Use, and more, despite a lack of consistent 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.