Cloudflare's Extortion – A Cautionary Tale

We’ve been a paying Cloudflare Enterprise customer for more than 4-5 years now, and while we expected enterprise-grade support and transparency, what we got instead was a harsh wake-up call.

Out of the blue-during renewal discussions Cloudflare dropped an “overage” bomb on us: charges amounting to nearly 1.5x our entire contract value over the past year. Though overages are usually billed on a monthly basis and paid too, this huge amount wasn’t flagged earlier, wasn’t progressively communicated, and worse we were never issued an official invoice for same.

Reason for this stupidity - Our account did not have an AE attached for a few months, and hence the billing was missed, which is entirely laughable for a company size of Cloudflare.

Even more shockingly, the overage calculations used total usage instead of billable usage, directly contradicting Cloudflare’s own billing documentation and even the data shared by Cloudflare team itself.

Over the botched overage claims, Cloudflare has issued mild threats to stop our service which is even worse.

Learnings from the entire fiasco:

- Never completely depend on one vendor for your needs.
- Always have a switch ready where you can transfer all traffic from Cloudflare to another vendor in few mins. Can be done easily if DNS is not hosted on Cloudflare.