What I don't like about CloudFlare

Today we finally cancelled CloudFlare. I'm sure it's a great service but I have a couple of pet peeves and this article is designed to express them.

We used CloudFlare for a high volume website. After a few years of using CloudFlare, I'm asking myself how good an investment this was, and if CloudFlare is such a great service.

Let's start by listing my pet peeves about the CloudFlare service. Please note I'm holding CloudFlare to a very specific high standard as it's a stock market listed company so I might appear overcritical.

Universal Login

Here is the CloudFlare Dashboard login page:
https://dash.cloudflare.com/login

It's completely beyond my comprehension why on earth they only have an Apple login there. Either get rid of the Apple login or use something sensible, light GitHub or Google or Microsoft. Or maybe more mainstream ones?

This Apple login on such a international company reminds me of how distorted US citizens think when they think of the world. It's much bigger than an Apple login.

Free Services (NOT!)

When I looked at my services, after I had cancelled it, it says:

Free plan

However, casting your eyes to the right, it says:

Terms

$5.00/mo

How is that a free service?

In order to solve this puzzle, you have to click on the Edit button, and scroll to the bottom. There you get:

Automatic platform optimization

Cloudflare’s plugin for WordPress websites is not included in Free plan site subscription.

Your plan selection will be supplemented with APO, purchased as add-ons.

This is probably some of the worst billing interface design I have seen and not to be expected of such a huge company. Also it feels like they are cheating you telling you it's free only to actually bill you $5.00. Hello?! This.is.not.free.

To me it seems this so called "APO" is really just an afterthought weirdly slapper onto "free billing".

WordPress Plugin

We paid for the WordPress plugin, but often found that WordPress became slower. We probably did something wrong, but anyhow. Why pay when it's so difficult?

Return on Investment

Did we get a good return on investment?

In my opinion we didn't get a good return on investment and CloudFlare as a company still has a long way to go.