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.
The biggest red flag is the up-front payment for a year, gives the indication that they are in actualy financial trouble, meaning short in cash right now.
Fucking idiots could have been just increasing the price yearly without any resistance, it’s unlikely a big casino would care about an extra 50-100 per month.
Exactly my thoughts
As I said in another comment: The up-front payment is the only thing that makes sense for Cloudflare. You got a customer that’s costing you money each month. They broke ToS. You offer them a deal still to keep the services running. And their CEO/CFO tells you they are looking at other providers like Fastly.
If Cloudflare gave them a monthly contract then the casino would simply pay for a month and switch over their services to a competitor in that time. So Cloudflare loses all the money from the past (where the casino used far too much traffic) and will barely recoup 10k (minus the running cost, so more likely 7k at the high end) for a single month. It’s just not worth it.
So they offer: Stick with us for a full year at least or get fucked. Which is fair.
If you are cloudflare and you suspect they broke ToS you quote which ToS has been broken, you specify which country blocking the customer is trying or has tried to circumvent and you force the customer to either move away or enforce geo-blocking for those countries (or have a separate account for those with your own IPs). There is no reason to cancel the whole account if the blocking is country-specific and there is no way that 10k a month is anyway a sufficient benefit for cloudflare for their IPs to be blocked in a country (affecting potentially hundreds or thousand of customers).
I’m pretty heavily invested in cloudflare. This news is definitely making me reconsider that investment.
What I can say, is their stock is looking very healthy. There are a lot of people buying a lot of stock for them and the prospect over the next 3 to 5 months looks very promising. The only way they wouldn’t have cash on hand as if they’re spending a ridiculous amount of cash on some project that I’m not aware of, and I feel like I would be aware of it.
This is very peculiar. Definitely warrants further investigation.
It’s because CF could see that moving to another provider would be too difficult for them. If they went month to month then they would be gone after one month. So CF decided to go with extortion instead. Either pay for $120k, or CF will set fire to your business.
I think it’s far more likely there’s some sales goal and or performance indicator at play here.
Another comment pointed out this was probably to prevent them from signing up for a month then using that month to bounce to another provider