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The CloudFlare Price Increase: A Translation For Those Who Don't Speak Corporate

CloudFlareSeems like inflation is everywhere these days!  Big hosting companies have broken the $5 mark, everything from gasoline to streaming is more expensive, and now Cloudflare has announced a 25% price increase:

Cloudflare is raising prices for the first time in the last 12 years. Beginning January 15, 2023, new sign-ups will be charged $25 per month for our Pro Plan (up from $20 per month) and $250 per month for our Business Plan (up from $200 per month). Any paying customers who sign up before January 15, 2023, including any currently paying customers who signed up at any point over the last 12 years, will stay at the old monthly price until May 14, 2023.

The announcement follows what has become the standard corporate playbook this year.  You might find a translation helpful.

CorporateSpeak

“We’ve been in business _____ years and have never raised prices before!”

Translation: We didn’t care about profits before because we had all that investor money.  Also, we haven’t raised prices because we haven’t been around very long.

“Wow, look at how much we’ve grown in that time!”

Translation: Like all businesses, we have to compete.  Every other company on the planet has grown and changed in the last ___ years and we are no different.

“We have a free tier!”

Translation: By raising prices, we widen the gulf between free and paid.  We’re also putting our features into paid, which makes free more and more impoverished.  In the long run, this means fewer people will convert, and that makes our free tier kind of a hassle for us, and we’ll probably discontinue it at some point.  But at the moment, look, we have a free tier!

“We are innovating with sustainable synergies and evolving transdimensional cross-domain breakthrough advanced technologies!”

Or as Cloudflare puts it,

  • “orders of magnitude more valuable across every dimension — performance, reliability, and security”
  • “our continued success should be primarily driven by new innovation”
  • “enable us to further accelerate our network expansion and pace of innovation “

In other words, like every other business you have to compete.

It’s All Double Talk

There’s a phenomenon in business that goes like this:

  • Business wants to communicate news
  • To get the best spin, they drown it in adjectives and superlatives and hand-waving
  • Consumers aren’t idiots and see through that, parsing the announcement to strip out all the nonsense to get to the part they’re interested in.  “Oh, my bill’s going up” is all they care about.

It’s a tedious, silly exercise but one businesses seem addicted to.  We get it – you’re raising prices.  Why can’t you just say that without reams about innovation, excellence, and the bright shining future?  The effort to generate these press releases and the the effort by the reader to skip all the nonsense and get to the facts is all wasted time.

TL;DR: Cloudflare wants more money.

See how easy it is?

 

raindog308

3 Comments

  1. Cloudflare:

    Yup, that’s pretty accurate. The execs don’t care about anything but money and will cut the budget everywhere they can, making employees suffer under immeasurable workload, squeezing the life out of everyone all to “sit at the adult table.” Nothing is as shiny as it seems, they’re yet another corporate jargon producing outlet, drifting away from their noble startup days.

    Source: I work for Cloudflare

    December 5, 2022 @ 2:18 am | Reply
  2. Azeem:

    Compare Cloudflare’s statement to the recent one by Scaleway and see the difference. No sugar-coating, they are honest that the rising energy costs means that they have no option but to raise costs. No sugar-coating. It makes it more relatable and makes the message geniune.

    https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/changes-to-scaleways-pricing/

    December 6, 2022 @ 5:54 am | Reply
  3. Alex:

    So long as they don’t touch the free plan, I couldn’t care less

    December 8, 2022 @ 8:39 pm | Reply

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