TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.
the problem with open source here is that open source isn’t really a solution… the software is kinda irrelevant: it’s the CDN itself - the hardware and networks - that’s the only important thing… that’s not something you can really open source. that’s just something you have to pay someone for
Really feels like a lot of info was left out
Of course there was. They’re a casino, that’s their game. Lie and trick to get a better outcome.
Not defending CF. This article has me thinking maybe I should move to something from the open source community.
Regardless of whether this is the whole story or not, the advice at the bottom to at least limit your CF dependence is a good idea.
Just based on cf response I’m guessing lawyers were threatened along with looking for another cdn.
Are there any open source options? Just based on scale I can’t think of any
the problem with open source here is that open source isn’t really a solution… the software is kinda irrelevant: it’s the CDN itself - the hardware and networks - that’s the only important thing… that’s not something you can really open source. that’s just something you have to pay someone for