Hi everyone. Been lurking for a bit, finally posting. I'm Evan, and I help with sales ops and CRM stuff at a small company. We rolled out Cloudflare Access about six months ago to replace a clunky VPN for our internal tools. The verdict? It's been rock-solid in production. Once it's set up, it just works, and the security model makes sense.
But wow, the onboarding was a real struggle. The documentation felt like it was written for people who already knew how it worked. I had a ton of questions that weren't easy to find answers for. For example, figuring out the exact difference between an Access Group and a Service Token for machine-to-machine access took way longer than it should have. And the first time I tried to build a policy with multiple rules, I wasn't sure if they evaluated as "AND" or "OR" without some trial and error.
I also wish the pricing was clearer upfront about what counts as a "user" for the monthly active user count. Is it a unique login per month? What about service accounts? We had to adjust our estimates after the first bill.
So, for anyone else considering it, my advice is to budget more time for the setup and testing phase. The product itself is great and the ROI on ditching the VPN is clear, but you have to get over that initial learning hump. Has anyone else found good resources or had similar hiccups? Especially around integrating it with our Salesforce environment for certain dashboards—I'm still figuring that part out.