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What is the issue you’re encountering
Cloudflare’s billing issues are automatically, without warning, downgrading my services. Causing major headaches with no help in sight.
Hi All,
I want to give a big warning to everyone here relying on paid services from Cloudflare. I am not a troll, I personally fell in love with the company when i saw Matthew Prince do his first BlackHat talk, and didn’t hesitate when I got the opportunity to use his services for my company. We are relying on a handful of paid features including, DNS load balancing, WAF and Zero Trust and everything has been working great.
Late September all of our client facing services were unavailable and met with 1016 error that was caused by our DNS load balancer being down and the CNAME’s pointing to it not being able to reach it. Confusingly I found out that my LB was down because I was downgraded to a Free Plan. Then I found out that there was a 5 day old $4 invoice due for some overage that was causing this. Because I didn’t pay that invoice, I got downgraded. Apparently they weren’t able to charge my card for $4 overage caused by traffic. I got no e-mail about the invoice, no e-mail that they couldn’t charge my card, no e-mail and warning that my account was being downgraded. It just happened.
When I pressed the “Pay this invoice” button manually, it immediately charged my existing card and the invoice was paid. No problems. So is this a problem with their system or with my card? Extremely, frustrated with the lack of communication I open up a ticket explaining the issue and expressing my frustration with this process.
A month goes by, I cool down and forgot about my ticket. We’re in October, yesterday, the same thing happened again! I can’t believe it, invoices were automatically paid in the mean time, but again a small invoice for some overages was not automatically paid and without any communication caused my account to downgrade back to their free plan. This time it’s paired with their downgraded billing system status that apparently has been going on for nearly two weeks. Which now cause me not being able to just pay the invoice and fix it myself, this time I can’t do anything. I can’t upgrade, and I can’t contact support. I look at my credit card statement, the invoice has been paid!
So let me get this right. I pay for my services, their system doesn’t work and downgrade my services without any communication. I want to fix it but their not letting me, then I want their support but I need to pay extra, but I can’t pay extra because I have to pay an invoice first that I can’t pay! This all happens while my production systems are unreachable. I open a ticket and notice that my ticket from a month ago is still open unanswered!
Obviously being extremely skeptical that my new ticket will get handled in any timely manner, I create a new account where I pay $250 to get to the live chat. After begging the agent to look into my other account I finally got some billing support assigned and after hours things started moving and my invoice got marked as paid that allowed me to pay once again manually and get my services back up. With all the frustration I accidentally paid for a year. This whole thing is beyond unprofessional, and I can’t believe that such a service that advertises on reliability can be so unreliable because of their billing and support.
Hopefully this post will help people in a similar situation to navigate this a little bit when it just happened to them. Cloudflare really doesn’t deserve my business for this ordeal, and I will be looking into alternatives.
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The case with Cloudflare billing being slow has been so true for many years. Their billing system seems to not have gone too much testing before being made live, and hence all these errors are popping up.
Currently frustrated beyond limit because tickets take months to answer.
I am sorry to hear this happen to you and thank you for taking the time to provide such detailed feedback about it. I regret the issues you’ve encountered and apologize for the disappointment you have faced. Cloudflare aims to provide best services and products to everyone.
If you already have a ticket, Support will respond to you on that ticket. Questions about billing will need to be resolved by the Customer Support team and cannot be resolved on the Community.
I believe someone from the billing team will take a look at your case and respond to your ticket. Please rest assured that Cloudflare is addressing these matters internally since recent Billing migration.
I am facing a similar issue. This is ridiculous. Cloudflare disabled critical services on my site without any warning. Zero emails, zero unpaid invoices, but they just went ahead and disabled my services.
The lack of concern from their side; responses to this thread, no responses to my tickets, and the number of people that are facing the issue and they’re still not taking it seriously, is just the icing on the cake for us. We’re actively planning to move to other providers.
I see we’re not alone in this matter 
We joined Cloudflare’s partner program as an agency and, as a pilot, launched the Pro version of the service with one of our clients. The issue of downgrading accounts to the free version due to partially unpaid invoices has become frequent—I have to check every few days to ensure the service hasn’t been downgraded to the free version again. Today, a new problem arose: the system generated three invoices on the same day with odd amounts. One was paid, but the other two are still marked as unpaid. When trying to pay them manually now, I am redirected to the Stripe platform, even though previously, payments were automatically taken from the card linked to our agency account!
The whole situation is absurd. We have dozens of clients we’d like to migrate to Cloudflare, but I can’t imagine dealing with random downgrades of packages to the free version and constantly monitoring unpaid invoices. Am I supposed to hire someone just for this mind-numbing task?
I have implemented Cloudflare for our clients’ projects many times outside of the partner program and never had payment issues, but what’s happening now is beyond comprehension. For now, we are forced to stop offering Cloudflare services to our clients and look for alternatives.
@jarek
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and understand how frustrating this experience has been. We value your partnership, and we want you to know that this issue isn’t being taken lightly.
Our engineering team has identified this as part of a larger issue and is actively working on a solution. We’re closely monitoring the situation and are committed to keeping you updated every step of the way. Please continue to watch your billing support ticket for updates on this situation as they become available.
Rest assured, resolving this issue is a priority for us, and we appreciate your understanding as we work towards a solution.
Thank You,
Jeremy Heath
Agency Program Manager
I also have the same issue on ticket 01247453. Many clients are beyond frustrated with Cloudflare and are asking me to change providers if a solution can’t be found. I joined the Agency program a while back. How long until the engineering team can fix this issue? Its been over a month so far and I would imagine its an urgent issue. I’ve emailed [email protected] a few times for updates and got the same answer you provided here. So I guess the ask is can we have a time frame for this to be fixed? Do we all need to use other providers if it cant be fixed? This issue has made it so cloudflare paid services are unavailable for my clients and that can impact their seo for speed etc costing them a lot more. I have several more clients that want to get cloudlfare services to that are waiting on cloudflare to fix its systems but its hard to promote a service that cant handle billing issues within a reasonable amount of time and I am running out of excuses for cloudflare. Please give a proper update that can be shared with clients.
@user80518 We will share your ticket with the team, thank you for including those details. I wanted to provide as much additional details around this.
Beginning in August, errors on our end caused a number of issues with paid plan subscriptions and invoices for our Agency Partners. I sincerely apologize for the difficulty this caused and for delays in our communication around this. I understand how frustrating this experience has been. We value your partnership, and I want you to know that this issue isn’t being taken lightly. We are learning from this, and I am taking steps to resolve the issue and do a better job communicating with you.
Our engineering team identified that this is part of a larger issue and is actively working on a solution. The solution will require a number of bug fixes. The first will be implemented during the first week of December (this week). After that, we will begin to implement a fix that will restore your subscriptions to their original state. I do not have an updated timeline from our engineers at this time on when the next fix will go out to re-store subscriptions.
I’m closely monitoring the situation and I am committed to keeping you updated every step of the way as we resolve this. You can expect another update from us once the first fix has been implemented. Rest assured that resolving this issue is a top priority for us, and we greatly appreciate your understanding as we work towards a solution.
If you have further questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected]
Thank You,
Jeremy Heath
Agency Program Manager
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