[dangus]

Cloudflare certainly handled this poorly in their execution and abysmal level of transparency, but they’re almost certainly purging loss-leading risky customers like OP and they really don’t owe OP the time of day.

OP is lucky CloudFlare even gave them 24 hours. I’m not going to dig through the their TOS or anything but I’m going to guess that you need to have an Enterprise contract to be a business of certain categories like banks/crypto, pornography, and gambling, which explains why they were being connected with a sales team.

OP mentions lost customer trust…but Cloudflare doesn’t want or need OP to trust them. $250 a month isn’t enough to deal with a business like that.

[Zak]

OP isn't the only customer whose trust they lose by handling the issue in this way. It's fine if they want to terminate a relationship with an unprofitable or risky customer, but doing it with insufficient notice to make other arrangements is pretty extreme. In a case of blatant abuse, that might be reasonable, but that doesn't seem to be the case here the way OP tells it.

I did quickly search the TOS for the word "gambling" and did not find it.

[dangus]

4. TERMINATION OF USE; DISCONTINUATION AND MODIFICATION OF THE WEBSITES AND ONLINE SERVICES

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.

[Zak]

Yes, that means OP probably can't sue them. My comment is about customer trust.

[dangus]

OP isn’t a customer (anymore), therefore customer trust isn’t a concept that exists for them anymore.

For everyone else, this clause is pretty much standard for all SaaS services. Take your pick. If you don’t want this level of service with any vendor you have to sign an enterprise contract where termination procedures are agreed upon more intentionally by both parties.

[Aeolun]

> OP isn’t a customer (anymore), therefore customer trust isn’t a concept that exists for them anymore.

I don’t know about you, but my customer trust is at an all time low, and I’m seriously considering at least moving all my registered domains off CloudFlare.

[Zak]

This comment still misses the point.

Any customer or potential customer who reads about this incident may have their trust in Cloudflare reduced, and rightfully so in my opinion. They have the legal right to terminate the relationship without reason or warning, but exercising that right in this context hurts their reputation.

[curtisblaine]

This still doesn't contain the word "gambling". Instead, it says that they can terminate your account at any moment, for any reason, no matter what your business type is, which is the opposite of "trust".

[dangus]

Oh well, last I checked “gambling” will match with a .* regex pattern.

[Dylan16807]

You said "I’m going to guess that you need to have an Enterprise contract to be a business of certain categories".

If that was the problem, this issue wouldn't be relevant to most people.

When you switch to "they can terminate anyone", and they act this rashly and unexpectedly, that means anyone needs to live in fear.

[dangus]

But that’s the norm for SaaS products, especially when you don’t have an enterprise contract where termination procedures are more robust.

So nobody is going to live in fear when cloudflare has the exact same TOS policy as everyone else.

[curtisblaine]

Yeah, but "gardening" matches too. So are you proposing that gambling sites and gardening sites have the same level of risk?

[dangus]

No, but I am saying that OP’s company has a combination of risk and likely overuse of services from being a global gambling website.

Being a gambling website makes you an outsized target for attacks.

OP basically wanted to run DraftKings from the small business plan and CF understandably didn’t care to deal with a loss-leading customer like that.