Tell HN: Don't Use Cloudflare

48 points

4 years ago

We are a reasonably medium sized company, with very tight IT budget. We were previously on GCP, CF sales team saw us use the free version and were happy to onboard us to their business plan ($200/mo). Now, after a year and half roughly, CF wants to move us to the Enterprise plan, claiming we are consuming a lot more bandwidth than what is "allowed" for the business plan and that they won't be able to provide us good uptime % at this rate.

A lot of this stuff wasn't communicated when we signed up for the business plan. There was no mention of limits, nor any contracts nor fineprint. The business plan was pitched to us as if it was the only plan we would ever need. And now, CF wants us to pay $3000-4000 a month which we clearly don't have budget for. I checked their fineprint, it says nothing about any limitations whatsoever. If you go to their pricing page, https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/business/ even that doesn't talk about anything of this sort.

I'm not saying CF is bad, but, their sales tactics are shady and there was a lot of integration done on our backends to migrate from GCP to CF. This really has left a sour taste in my mouth. If they had just been upfront, I could have saved all this pain and money.

Do you know of any alternatives to CF? If I can convince my top execs to afford $3000 a month, I want to make sure it's on something else and not on CloudFlare. Pretty sure this $3000 a month will be increased to additional for some other excuse later as I don't trust them anymore. I was thinking of Google Cloud CDN, but it doesn't look cheap. We do about 200-300TB a month as per CF reports.

Any suggestions are much appreciated.

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