For $10k / mo paid 1 year in advance, your cloud provider does a legal review of the situation and figures out how to make your problem work on both the technical and legal level. It's not a "special plan", it's consulting.
Edit: "How do you know?" -- I don't know it's actually what happened, but when switching to enterprise, you don't go from 10% margin to 98% margin. The added costs actually represent added budget for the provider to deal with your "special case". ALL enterprise pricing tiers are disguised consulting contracts.
It's 10k a month for them to set up a dedicated IP address pool so that they could BYOIP and buy their own IP addresses instead of getting the IP addresses in cloudflare's main IP address pool repeatedly banned or reputation harmed.
i.e. it's a $10k fee for maintaining the infrastructure for a quarantine around their services
They did. Repeatedly. You see it mentioned in the few emails the OP chose to share. But they also didn't share the other communication they had over the month long discussion they had with cloudflare.
> BYOIP also costs nothing to produce.
That's not really accurate. Cloudflare is entirely built around one big unified anycast network. If you want to provision an entirely separate network that maintains all the same features they are using from the main cloudflare network, that's going to require provisioning a lot of cpu time and routing table slots at a lot of different sites plus whatever admin and engineer overhead comes from maintaining this quarantined service.
>If you do not use byoip with your service you cannot be a customer, and also pay us $120k upfront while we do not tell you why, it's only a 40x price increase. You have 24h.
As a network engineer I'm well aware of what it costs to add prefixes to what you announce over bgp, some miniscule additional CPU overhead, likely unmeasurable. Even slow mips processors could process full table bgp.
This is literally all written communication they gave us. The only other thing was calls. Not calls with anyone that had any knowledge about what any issues were, but calls with sales.
The costs for announcing the customer's IPs and making sure that only they are the ones actually sitting on them would be minuscule. Nowhere near $10k/mo. Maybe $100/mo.
Anycast/unicast changes nothing here. Anycast simply means that the same prefix is announced in multiple different PoPs.
Assuming that is what was happening, why would CF suddenly be okay with an illegal site if they pay more? Might as well call it the criminal enterprise plan then.
