Looks like Cloudflare did change their minds later and offered to mitigate the attack pro bono:
Following our initial quote from CloudFlare, we understand that some CloudFlare employees undertook a grassroots effort internally to convince the leadership to sponsor our needs, and eventually CloudFlare came back to us with an offer to sponsor our services for us free of charge. This was a very generous offer for which we are very appreciative; in the end we did not take them up on it as we had made substantial inroads towards an alternative solution by that time. I have had my reservations about CloudFlare in the past, but they were there for us in a time of need and I am grateful for that.
Typical "corporate pricing"--they offer a really high price they'll expect you'll negotiate downwards to something reasonable. The Sourcehut negotiators probably never dealt with this kind of "sales model" before.
That said, what will happen when more companies publish their experiences with "enterprise sales"? There's an article from HEY[1] about how broken the sales process is. To get a quote, you normally have to endure 2 or 3 zoom calls before the price is unveiled.
There's probably room for an innovator to fix all of this.
We did negotiate them down a bit but we didn't feel that we could come to an agreement within our budget and decided to move on. Apparently this was an excellent negotiation tactic because they came back with an offer of $0!
It’s not broken per se. Charging different customers different prices based on their willingness to pay maximizes profits. Heck even Sourcehut does it, but they don’t require interacting with sales because at their pricing they don’t have enough margin for a sales team.
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Looks like Cloudflare did change their minds later and offered to mitigate the attack pro bono:
Typical "corporate pricing"--they offer a really high price they'll expect you'll negotiate downwards to something reasonable. The Sourcehut negotiators probably never dealt with this kind of "sales model" before.
That said, what will happen when more companies publish their experiences with "enterprise sales"? There's an article from HEY[1] about how broken the sales process is. To get a quote, you normally have to endure 2 or 3 zoom calls before the price is unveiled.
There's probably room for an innovator to fix all of this.
1: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-only-thing-worse-than-cloud-pr...
We did negotiate them down a bit but we didn't feel that we could come to an agreement within our budget and decided to move on. Apparently this was an excellent negotiation tactic because they came back with an offer of $0!
It’s not broken per se. Charging different customers different prices based on their willingness to pay maximizes profits. Heck even Sourcehut does it, but they don’t require interacting with sales because at their pricing they don’t have enough margin for a sales team.