Cloudflare, amazing services … unreachable customer support or sales (even for paying users).
It’s so bizarre because it’s like their product is made by one (amazingly good) company and their support/sales by another (amazing bad) company.
You have to escalate on Discord, HN, etc to get even the most simple of customer support or sales questions acknowledged.
It makes me super uncomfortable being a paying customer, relying upon such support & sales.
@eastdakota, if you’re reading this - I’d encourage you to create your own personal cloudflare (paid account) to experience this. It does seem like the first week or so of being a customer, support prioritizes your questions. Wait a month or so, then reach out to support or sales - and see how you won’t even get an acknowledgment. I only say this as a paying customer rooting for your company success.
Huh. I work for a small organization under their Project Galileo, which basically means a free Pro account. We've only had simple needs, but any time I email a rep I get a response in 24-48 hours. I believe what you're saying, I just wonder why the experience is so varied.
I downgraded a $250/mo plan but it bugged out, re-added it to my account, and charged me. Couldn't remove it. Contacted support and after a month of no response they closed the ticket.
Created another ticket. After a week they apologized and said something about having a very high volume of support requests.
Your strategy of writing and instantly deleting derogatory comments is quite annoying. Maybe step back from the 4Chan school of internet communications every once in a while.
Cloudflare seems to be the only company in the world where sales does not want to speak to you. So if Arroyo becomes part of the Cloudflare Enterprise offering, dont get your hopes up to be able to use it. Except maybe if you are already a Cloudflare Enterprise customer.
I have tried now for over a month to open an enterprise account with them, no luck yet. I filed tickets, called their hotline, but I just cannot get through to a sales person.
Are there any alternatives out there that provide a baseline of support and allow sending PHI data?
I have heard this many times about Cloudflare. Its very odd how (seemingly) dysfunctional their sales pipeline is.
It should be really easy. All their competitors make it easy, anyway. Not sure whats going on here.
Thankfully for most situations their self serve options are clear and transparent I've found, but the fact remains that sometimes you need that enterprise agreement like in your case, or in cases where you want to do tenant software (IE building on Cloudflare as core infrastructure for a SaaS)
The whole Hacker News support thing gives good dev vibes but we had a support ticket for over-billing go unanswered for months (01288863) despite email pleas to a salesperson and then the ticket was closed without response. Made it impossible for me to convince my org to continue using Cloudflare.
That's wild. I checked my inbox and they are definitely in there with the regular scrum of sales drones sending spam. I wonder what happened and I wonder how I can do the same.
Unless otherwise expressly permitted in writing by Cloudflare, you will not and you have no right to:
(i) use the Services to store or transmit any “protected health information” as that term is defined in 45 C.F.R. 160.103 without Cloudflare’s written consent;
We plan to process PHI data, so I need written permission. It turns out that I need an enterprise license (it took a long time to get to that realisation, because it is not documented, and ticket lead times even with a business account are weeks). The catch is, you cannot just upgrade to enterprise, you need to talk to someone.
Congratulations, second streaming acquisition in recent memory, after benthos.
Arroyo on paper looks amazing, high performance, advanced streaming primitives like windows and joins.
I think / hope the foundations provide a long term alternative to flink and spark streaming, the extremely heavy jvm-based incumbents.
I only have ~5 hours of experience with it so def an ultra beginner, but it was very UI configuration heavy when I tried it. API based config was mentioned but didn’t slot into the way $dayjob provisions so it was a very hard sell.
In response to this I created a lightweight high performance dev-centric streaming solution powered by duckdb, it’s getting a little traction
Cloudflare has a strong tradition of open source, even for core parts of their product, like workerd (https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd), and also maintains a bunch of key infrastructural libraries like quiche.
They aim to compete with their global infrastructure and network and not with restrictive licenses.
God no, baselimehq, they didn’t even communicate to users that were degrading the product gradually, filtering and aggregating features broke until it was unusable. If existing customer then jump ship before they kill it slowly
Baselime, that one really made me sad. I had talked to people on the team there before they got acquired and they were all very nice and responsive. It was the best Lambda monitoring platform I had found (for my needs).
What did you move to instead?
Curious what you mean? (I'm not affiliated with any of them, just been looking for a fast/low-latency/high-throughput hybrid batch/streaming query engine for a while).
Been struggling to find anything that looks mature. Ideally something with a full python dataframe based api.
They buy the team, the know-how, the customers, the brand. The repo is open source up until now, but they can create a paid offering with premium features over the open source code. They can also offer specialized hosting for that solution (which is a very clear advantage of joining with cloud flare)
They might be able to relicense the codebase for people who don’t want (for example) to comply with the GPL. Although that doesn’t seem to be Cloudflare’s motivation for this acquisition.
Cloudflare, amazing services … unreachable customer support or sales (even for paying users).
It’s so bizarre because it’s like their product is made by one (amazingly good) company and their support/sales by another (amazing bad) company.
You have to escalate on Discord, HN, etc to get even the most simple of customer support or sales questions acknowledged.
It makes me super uncomfortable being a paying customer, relying upon such support & sales.
@eastdakota, if you’re reading this - I’d encourage you to create your own personal cloudflare (paid account) to experience this. It does seem like the first week or so of being a customer, support prioritizes your questions. Wait a month or so, then reach out to support or sales - and see how you won’t even get an acknowledgment. I only say this as a paying customer rooting for your company success.
Our Cloudflare CSR is laughably slow at responding to things. Once it took 3-4 months and I was wondering if he still worked there.
Huh. I work for a small organization under their Project Galileo, which basically means a free Pro account. We've only had simple needs, but any time I email a rep I get a response in 24-48 hours. I believe what you're saying, I just wonder why the experience is so varied.
you use a monopoly whose only feature is being a monopoly.
I downgraded a $250/mo plan but it bugged out, re-added it to my account, and charged me. Couldn't remove it. Contacted support and after a month of no response they closed the ticket.
Created another ticket. After a week they apologized and said something about having a very high volume of support requests.
Your strategy of writing and instantly deleting derogatory comments is quite annoying. Maybe step back from the 4Chan school of internet communications every once in a while.
Cloudflare seems to be the only company in the world where sales does not want to speak to you. So if Arroyo becomes part of the Cloudflare Enterprise offering, dont get your hopes up to be able to use it. Except maybe if you are already a Cloudflare Enterprise customer.
I have tried now for over a month to open an enterprise account with them, no luck yet. I filed tickets, called their hotline, but I just cannot get through to a sales person.
Are there any alternatives out there that provide a baseline of support and allow sending PHI data?
I have heard this many times about Cloudflare. Its very odd how (seemingly) dysfunctional their sales pipeline is.
It should be really easy. All their competitors make it easy, anyway. Not sure whats going on here.
Thankfully for most situations their self serve options are clear and transparent I've found, but the fact remains that sometimes you need that enterprise agreement like in your case, or in cases where you want to do tenant software (IE building on Cloudflare as core infrastructure for a SaaS)
Sorry about that experience. Can you email dane@cloudflare.com to figure out what happened
The whole Hacker News support thing gives good dev vibes but we had a support ticket for over-billing go unanswered for months (01288863) despite email pleas to a salesperson and then the ticket was closed without response. Made it impossible for me to convince my org to continue using Cloudflare.
That's wild. I checked my inbox and they are definitely in there with the regular scrum of sales drones sending spam. I wonder what happened and I wonder how I can do the same.
Reach out to me (aly@cloudflare.com). I'm sorry we let you down. I'm sure I can help.
We use cloudflare, and i am wondering why you would want to talk to a salesperson, over just using their console yourself.
In their terms [0], Cloudflare says
2.2.1 Restrictions
Unless otherwise expressly permitted in writing by Cloudflare, you will not and you have no right to:
(i) use the Services to store or transmit any “protected health information” as that term is defined in 45 C.F.R. 160.103 without Cloudflare’s written consent;
We plan to process PHI data, so I need written permission. It turns out that I need an enterprise license (it took a long time to get to that realisation, because it is not documented, and ticket lead times even with a business account are weeks). The catch is, you cannot just upgrade to enterprise, you need to talk to someone.
[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/terms/
thanks for explaining, and that makes sense!
To get private volume or contractual pricing, for one.
I guess they laid off too many sales people
Congratulations, second streaming acquisition in recent memory, after benthos.
Arroyo on paper looks amazing, high performance, advanced streaming primitives like windows and joins.
I think / hope the foundations provide a long term alternative to flink and spark streaming, the extremely heavy jvm-based incumbents.
I only have ~5 hours of experience with it so def an ultra beginner, but it was very UI configuration heavy when I tried it. API based config was mentioned but didn’t slot into the way $dayjob provisions so it was a very hard sell.
In response to this I created a lightweight high performance dev-centric streaming solution powered by duckdb, it’s getting a little traction
https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow
Iceberg has been one of the most popular feature so far:
https://sql-flow.com/docs/tutorials/iceberg-sink
Congratulations to Micah's team.
To everyone else: does CloudFlare have a good reputation for maintaining open source acquisitions?
(Arroyo founder here)
Cloudflare has a strong tradition of open source, even for core parts of their product, like workerd (https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd), and also maintains a bunch of key infrastructural libraries like quiche.
They aim to compete with their global infrastructure and network and not with restrictive licenses.
Can you explain why you have such a bad perception in the Open Source community if this is true? To me it seems calculated to raise your valuation.
God no, baselimehq, they didn’t even communicate to users that were degrading the product gradually, filtering and aggregating features broke until it was unusable. If existing customer then jump ship before they kill it slowly
Baselime, that one really made me sad. I had talked to people on the team there before they got acquired and they were all very nice and responsive. It was the best Lambda monitoring platform I had found (for my needs). What did you move to instead?
What does Arroyo have that Materialize or Feldera do not?
It seems that Arroyo is a strict subset of those.
Curious what you mean? (I'm not affiliated with any of them, just been looking for a fast/low-latency/high-throughput hybrid batch/streaming query engine for a while).
Been struggling to find anything that looks mature. Ideally something with a full python dataframe based api.
That's Feldera for you. It has a full blown SQL Api.
Materialize is cool as well, but is sorta hostile to self-hosting.
Yoooo congrats Micah!! Joining Brandon and Brayden as W23 acquisitions by Cloudflare!
Congrats again micah! Also Iceberg catalog on R2 without needing to spin up additional services... lets gooooo
Is streaming into Iceberg / R2 catalog going to become a priority?
What's the intention of these for profit companies "buying" open-source repos? Can they even be really bought ?
They buy a company, not a repo.
They buy the team, the know-how, the customers, the brand. The repo is open source up until now, but they can create a paid offering with premium features over the open source code. They can also offer specialized hosting for that solution (which is a very clear advantage of joining with cloud flare)
They might be able to relicense the codebase for people who don’t want (for example) to comply with the GPL. Although that doesn’t seem to be Cloudflare’s motivation for this acquisition.
Congrats Micah! (Did my part on LI :) ).
Interesting to see where this integrates and how it will boost streaming at Cloudflare.
Clownflare: Conquering the web by backdooring one site at a time!
Congratulations!
for how much?
Smart people top line right now is $100M/head. That for 2 founders is $200M. They had $5M revenue in 2024. That suggests $100M. So i'd say $100M-150M.
I doubt they got 20x.