Paid $2400 to Cloudflare, support refuses to help
I signed up for Cloudflare's Business plan and paid for a year in advance. While adding a new domain I made a typo and now the subscription is stuck in a limbo.
I can't change the domain without contacting their support or paying another $2400. When I open a support ticket, their portal shows 'Unable to find your account' and tells me to open another support request for it.
All support tickets are closed automatically by their "AI" which points to the same article that says open a ticket.
Is shaming them on Twitter my only option left?
This would be an excellent use of small claims court; you want paid-for service provided and they’re giving you the phone-tree runaround. The court would prefer a settlement be reached before trial and their legal team will have no trouble bypassing their support AI to get a ticket opened.
Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court.
Had a similar situation happen with another company. Went to take them to small claims but the judge threw it out because of the arbitration clause. We then spent months and many resources but were unable to continue because we couldn't successfully contact their arbitrator to proceed with the dispute. Long story short, we wrote it all off as it was becoming too expensive both with time and resources.
This is all by design, and admittedly, a clever way for companies to do what they do.
One of the things I was most surprised about recently is just how buggy and unpleasant to use the Cloudflare dashboard is. We only moved to them recently and I was really shocked. I had one situation where the dashboard literally showed me the wrong domain but rules for another, which I think was a session or caching bug. I really thought it would be better for a company that size!
You'd be surprised... I did a LOT of cleanup work for a private college that had a lot of "clever" developers that didn't understand static variables in C#, or how the ASP.Net lifecycle worked. Race conditions and all kinds of weird errors when the system got busy. Not to mention a lot of "fun" performance issues.
Just because someone has a CS degree doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing.
> Is shaming them on Twitter my only option left?
Shaming them on here works better, if you get to the frontpage then their CEO or CTO will probably show up to defuse the situation.
@eastdakota (CEO)
@jgrahamc (former CTO, now board member)
Fingers crossed!
You should ask an AI to help you file a chargeback.
Hi. I am sorry about this issue. Can you email dane@cloudflare.com, and it will get resolved? I am also working on more systematic fixes for when customers get into this situation.
The more systematic fix is to make paying customers speak with actual humans, rather than buggy AI
Thanks Dane!
Escalating to a human in a time-appropriate manner seems like what people are asking for.
Thanks, email sent.
> All support tickets are closed automatically by their "AI" which points to the same article that says open a ticket.
Maybe just have a script follow this infinite loop?
That's wild! Hopefully someone at Cloudflare sees this and can help you out
Namecheap support immediately refunded when I mentioned them I made a typo in the domain i bought.
That's great. I don't even want to change a domain registration, just need to add an existing domain to Cloudflare.
They are more responsive on the Discord channel. I've talked with a few of their support people and am hardly a paying user.