A story about how a small SaaS suddenly got an account limit from Cloudflare
The founder of
Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212
This time, Hacker News user tardis_thad, the founder of Tardis.dev, was suddenly hit with account restrictions from Cloudflare. He has been using Cloudflare's developer service, Cloudflare Workers , for the past four years, but his account was suddenly restricted on February 3, 2023.
Tardis.dev also reported to users on Twitter that the API was unresponsive due to account restrictions by Cloudflare.
@eastdakota small SaaS founder here, been heavy Cloudflare Workers user (4 billions requests server per month) since about 4 years already and today without any warning my account was restricted, both website and APIs are down, customers angry.
— Tardis.dev (@tardis_dev) February 3, 2023
When Mr. tardis_thad contacted Cloudflare's support in a hurry, the support said, 'Well, it seems that you got caught in' 2.8 Restriction on providing non-HTML content '.'
'2.8 Restrictions on Providing Non-HTML Content' means Section 2.8 of Cloudflare's Terms of Service. As a result, in principle, users can use the service only in HTML, and it is said that non-HTML content such as videos, irrational proportions of images, and sounds cannot be used.
That said, the convention seems out of place in today's Internet, where sharing media content such as images and videos has become commonplace. In fact, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince , writing directly to another Hacker News thread created in 2019, said that using Cloudflare Workers to host images would violate the aforementioned terms. In the topic, he said , ``That's only for conventional services. For Workers, the terms of service that apply are different.There is nothing to worry about in this project.'' He expressed the view that there would be no particular problem if
Despite feeling uncomfortable with this situation, Mr. tardis_thad was convinced that ``the usage fee I paid was too cheap'', contacted Cloudflare's sales team, and changed to a pay-as-you-go plan. I offered to take it. Cloudflare's sales response to this is, 'It's up to you when it comes to enterprise plans. You can get around it by using self-serve, but if you choose enterprise, you can authorize anything in the $XX/month range. There is a possibility.'
In this context, tardis_thad said, ``I fully understand the need to upgrade, but why didn't you send me an email before the service went completely down? I asked a question in a Zoom meeting with the sales person, but they said, 'That kind of thing will never happen,'' he questioned.
Mr. tardis_thad's thread received more than 300 comments at the time of writing the article. In it, there is a post asking tardis_thad to explain how the deal with Cloudflare ended up. No. When I first contacted support, they told me that it was likely that I was being restricted due to non-HTML content restriction violations, and advised me to contact sales. If this continues, the account will be completely banned within 24 hours, so I will prepare an offer within 15 minutes.”In the meantime, when I tweeted and posted on Hacker News, Cloudflare's CTO ( The CTO) noticed it, and sales said, 'CTO has approved it, so please update the ticket to unban the account,' and that solved the problem, at least for now. I don't have any details on what the problem is and I'm still waiting for a quote for the enterprise plan.'
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