Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):
This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.
I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.
CloudFlare don’t need to subsidise an online casino with millions of subscribers, at everyone else’s expense. Sure CF are a bunch of gigglefucks but this time I think they made a good decision.
Unless the casino is doing something illegal, it’s really not their decision to make. If they don’t want to subsidize them, all they’d have to do is be transparent and fair in their pricing. They way CF handled it instead just seems unprofessional and deceitful.
Exactly right.
If they are somehow losing money routing traffic then their pricing is fundamentally wrong, which is just as big of a black eye for cloudflare.
Now they’re getting $0 and bad press, so no I don’t think they did.
$0 is better than having a customer whose costs exceed their revenue; it looks like the bad press is being managed; and also fuck online casinos very much.
Just because you don’t like online casinos, doesn’t mean cloudflare didn’t completely fuck this up. They could have negotiated reasonable terms to increase their revenue on this account instead of going the route of stonewalling and extortion.
So not only did they lose this customer, but this bad press will ensure a lot of others never sign up with them, potentially costing them millions in foregone sales.
Yeah this was a massive boondoggle…
Are these millions of potential customers in the room with us?
If they’re charging $120,000 per client, it only takes 17 potential lost customers to constitute “millions.” It’s realistic that at least 17 companies might be put-off with the way this was handled.
Subsidise how? They were using their existing plan as intended and even willing ditch the grey-area parts. If CF cannot afford to offer their plans as they are, they should change the offered plans, not hunt for easy prey.
Clearly CF were losing money on this account, so their other customers were subsidising.
Ah fuck it, I’m clearly at the bottom of a dog pile here, and I don’t want to be friends with any of you, nor am I going to start thinking that an online casino deserves anything but contempt, so I’ll be off.
No no, you’re really not far off. Few, if any people here are advocating for CF to continue to provide the same services for the same price. It seems clear to most (including the author) that a price increase was justified. The problem we’re all having is how they went about it, agnostic of the client.
(I don’t care who the client was and don’t care one way or the other about online casinos.)
I read the post and it doesn’t sound abusive at all
Plus: cloudflare kept putting them in touch with the sales department. Not legal. Not technical support
It’s just shit customer service, even if the customer is making a ton of money compared to your fees. Should a casino pay more for other services, too, just because they" don’t need a subsidy"?
As strange as this may sound… if you’re having serious technical problems, it’s the sales team you want to talk to.
Sales people have way more pull at tech companies than the engineering teams do. If your sales rep sounds an alarm, people listen. When tech support sounds an alarm, nobody bats an eye.
In this particular situation, they should be reaching out to cloudflare’s legal team. But, with their own legal team.
Good luck with the lawsuit for breach of contract when you broke the contract. I’m sure the judge will be amused.
It’s not the decision to ask more money, it’s how they made it and in violation of their own terms of service, also extortion, so yes they are dipshits.