TL;DR: We've been on the Cloudflare Business plan ($250/month) for years. They suddenly contacted us and asked us to either pay them $120k up front for one year of Enterprise within 24 hours or they would take down all of our domains. While this escalated up our business we had 3 sales calls with them, trying to figure out what was happening and how to reach a reasonable contract in a week. When we told them we were also in talks with Fastly, they suddenly "purged" all our domains, causing huge downtime in our core business, sleepless nights migrating away from CF, irreparable loss in customer trust and weeks of ongoing downtime in our internal systems.

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Cloudflare demanded the website owner to pay $120k within 24 hours or they would take down all domains, leading to downtime and loss in customer trust.

Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay 120k$ within 24h

This changed my view on CloudFlare and recomending it to companies.

The nightmare here is so many IT people and developers that learned nothing from the scammy unlimited hosting providers in the past. Even those small companies that sold 50TB servers for the price of what reputable big vendors included for the cost of 1TB.
I’m shocked and sad that so many developers still don’t know there is no such thing as unlimited traffic. Cloudflare is overselling, this is why those $250 unlimited plans are attractive. Until you start to actually push heavy traffic, and they have to kick you out.
This is the main reason Cloudflare has zero credibility for anyone who works with datacenters and networks. Ask them what kind of network speed is included in that unlimited $250 plan…crickets…
This all works wonderful until you actually start to push a few TB’s a month and suddenly, they are losing money on your account.
The trick is the same as the old unlimited $5 hosting accounts. You are violating our policies, upgrade to XXX$ a month or leave.

Thanks for the heads up. If I ever get “the call”, I’ll politely tell them I’ll get the CEO to contact them, meanwhile I move all our services somewhere else.

What an absolute nightmare. Be right back, grabbing popcorn.

If you’re running a large online casino, with 4M monthly users, and were only paying $250/month for these services which are fundamental to the operation of your business, then you’re talking, the fucking, piss.
You absolutely should have been on an enterprise plan, paying based on your usage, and if that’s going to cost $120k per year, then it should give you a good indication just how much you were taking the piss on a $250/month plan.
If your CEO and CTO started trying to play hard ball using the threat of moving to a competitor as a negotiation tactic, then they very clearly had no idea of the actual situation you were in. It’s a dick move, and they were called out for it.
Your $250 probably wouldn’t even cover Cloudflare’s admin costs for all the back and forth. Do you not see this?
Having you as a customer would have been costing Cloudflare significantly more than you were paying them, and if you weren’t prepared to pay for what you were actually using, then of course they’d be very happy for you to go elsewhere, where you’ll be charged a lot more that $250/month. If you’re still only paying your new provider that amount, then it’ll not be long before they realise it’s not worth their while having you as a customer either.