While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post:
if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+
I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate this further. Also happy to chat with anyone else with questions or issues (zaid at cloudflare)
It seems like the author already went above and beyond to try to get this resolved through the proper channels. Why did it take an HN front page post to get it actually looked into? It does not inspire confidence in your service.
The thing is that Cloudflare has no proper channels. Anyone that has tried Cloudfare's support (even as a paying customer) knows that it's almost impossible to get a sensible answer to anything.
That's the way tech companies work today. You need to have connections or spend social capital to reach people who can solve issues. Or you need to bang your head in support channels for weeks hoping that someone will escalate your issue.
Sometimes there's workaround, if you pay big bucks, you might get "personal" manager who can actually connect you with necessary people. But that service is not available for every company out there. And if you don't pay big bucks, you don't have a chance.
This scheme probably makes sense. At certain scale you just can't talk to everyone. When you have 20 developers and 20 million clients, one person can have only so much time. And most support issues are stupid anyway.
I recall several similar situations with Cloudflare: a user has billing/service problems and the only way to get some support is to end on HN frontpage or reddit ...
Skimming through the blog post, it sounds like in the end they were not overcharged, but the timing and calculation of prorated charges for upgrades, vs. the credits for what what already paid, was a little weird and not obvious.
What contact info did you use? My partner is the author of this blog post, and neither of us has been contacted by Cloudflare that we know of.
My original ticket number was 3029706 but it seems to have disappeared after the support platform migration.
While I continue to dig in to the specifics of the billing and support issues described, I can confirm this bit from the blog post:
if you stored 2 million images and delivered 1 million images, your total cost for that month for the Images product should be ~$210, not $400+
I've reached out to the author to get some additional information which will help me investigate this further. Also happy to chat with anyone else with questions or issues (zaid at cloudflare)