My take on the post appears very different to yours (or deleted CF employee). It didn't appear he was disputing the price or need to pay, but disputing how the situation was handled - with lack of professionalism, transparency and heavy-handed sales tactics which were simply not necessary or appropriate.
$120k may not be a substantial amount for a casino but a request to pay monthly is a reasonable one which could have been accommodated and likely prevented this whole issue. There appeared to be no desire for CF to work with the customer or answer any questions beyond the demand for money, most businesses would try harder to upsell a customer to $120k not cut them off.
My biggest problem with it is that this was clearly a sales tactic _from the start_. The initial e-mail came from a Sales Development Rep (SDR), a job that is focused on generating leads for the sales team. It didn't come from somebody in a technical role.
CF has a process that generates leads from existing, low-spend customers and funnels them into SDRs to push them towards high-spend programs. That's totally acceptable IF the limits are clear -- "Hey, your business plan only covers X amount of traffic and you're at 2X, we need to address this" -- but, if everything played out as shown here, this is a highly unethical sales process.
I don't think we should take issue with a member of biz dev leading the process. I don't particularly like some sales teams, but others are perfectly fine to discuss the scope of an account.
I do think there's an issue with not engaging in a dialogue over the billing and sticking to a script. If you want someone to pay $120k, your biz dev team better be prepared to put some effort in.
Overall, I think both sides have some culpability for the outage. It was a business risk that management either didn't understand or didn't take seriously. And it was a massively missed opportunity for Cloudflare.
My take on the post appears very different to yours (or deleted CF employee). It didn't appear he was disputing the price or need to pay, but disputing how the situation was handled - with lack of professionalism, transparency and heavy-handed sales tactics which were simply not necessary or appropriate.
$120k may not be a substantial amount for a casino but a request to pay monthly is a reasonable one which could have been accommodated and likely prevented this whole issue. There appeared to be no desire for CF to work with the customer or answer any questions beyond the demand for money, most businesses would try harder to upsell a customer to $120k not cut them off.
My biggest problem with it is that this was clearly a sales tactic _from the start_. The initial e-mail came from a Sales Development Rep (SDR), a job that is focused on generating leads for the sales team. It didn't come from somebody in a technical role.
CF has a process that generates leads from existing, low-spend customers and funnels them into SDRs to push them towards high-spend programs. That's totally acceptable IF the limits are clear -- "Hey, your business plan only covers X amount of traffic and you're at 2X, we need to address this" -- but, if everything played out as shown here, this is a highly unethical sales process.
I don't think we should take issue with a member of biz dev leading the process. I don't particularly like some sales teams, but others are perfectly fine to discuss the scope of an account.
I do think there's an issue with not engaging in a dialogue over the billing and sticking to a script. If you want someone to pay $120k, your biz dev team better be prepared to put some effort in.
Overall, I think both sides have some culpability for the outage. It was a business risk that management either didn't understand or didn't take seriously. And it was a massively missed opportunity for Cloudflare.