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by Animats 2015 days ago
Check their terms.[1]

First of all, you're giving them a license to your content for their purposes. "By submitting, posting, or publishing your content, suggestions, enhancement requests, recommendations, feedback, information, data, or comments (“Content”) to any Website or Online Service, you are granting Cloudflare a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license (with the right to sublicense) to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works of your Content. You will retain ownership of your Content, however, any use of your Content by Cloudflare may be without any compensation paid to you." For example, Cloudflare could make a copy of your site and monetize it.

Second, you can be cancelled at any time. "We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Websites and/or Online Services at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Websites and/or Online Services) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Websites and/or Online Services or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Websites and/or Online Services." For example, if you were promoting a product that competes with Cloudflare, your site could be taken down with no notice.

Those are the big ones. Also, there's no uptime guarantee, an overreaching indemnification clause, and the usual "I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further" clause.

It's about as bad as the Apple App Store.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/

2 comments

(no longer at cloudflare)

This is the TOS for cloudflare.com, not the TOS for cloudflare's services, I believe.

See https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ for the self-serve plan TOS, for example.

Crucial definitions:

> “Websites” refers to www.cloudflare.com, as well as the other websites that Cloudflare operates and that link to these Terms, and (ii) “Online Services” means Cloudflare’s products and services that are publicly available without a subscription or a Cloudflare account, including, but not limited to, the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver service, including 1.1.1.1 for Families, Cloudflare Time Services, and RPKI Portal.

Ah, they did make the terms disjoint. Google, in contrast, has overlaps, but the terms for the specific service have priority. "If these terms conflict with the service-specific additional terms, the additional terms will govern for that service."

Cloudflare does force you into arbitration if you buy their services, but at least it's AAA, not JAMS.