That and also, what company of that scale can you just go to finance and be like "Hey Cloudflare just jacked up our rate from $250/mo to $10000/mo and they want the whole 120k for the whole year right now and we need it done within 24h or they'll cut us off". Even for companies spending a million a month on AWS costs that's 12% of the budget.

And also asking it all upfront, like, what? What happened to monthly billing? What company has the money to pay infrastructure bills yearly like that, especially on such notice?

Large companies have big cash flows, they don't have 120k just laying around, it's tied in some assets somewhere especially with the inflation, having large amounts of plain cash is bad finances. They probably need to take out a loan or sell some stocks or whatever. You can't do that in 24h.

I have no doubt the author is omitting important details in the story, they may have been getting warnings for a while at this point and they just ignored them because "we're happy with our business plan". But the whole upfront part, then terminating the account as soon as they expressed looking at competitors pricing which is absolutely normal to want to do when your bill goes up 40x, if not required by company policy. Shady as fuck from Cloudflare.