Cloudflare Pro vs Business for MSPs: How to Protect Clients Without Owning All the Risk

Most MSPs and MSSPs include Cloudflare in their stack. It looks good in a slide. You can say: we put you behind Cloudflare, you get a WAF, you get bot protection, you get DDoS coverage, you get a faster site. Your client feels like security is handled.

The problem is what the client hears. They hear that their login is protected against credential stuffing. They hear that checkout fraud is contained. They hear that the origin cannot be hit directly. They hear that uptime is guaranteed and someone is watching 24×7. They hear that an auditor or enterprise buyer will accept this setup.

That is not what Cloudflare Pro or Cloudflare Business actually guarantees. That is what you, the MSP, just silently promised.

This post is written for MSPs and MSSPs who offer Cloudflare Pro Plan or Cloudflare Business Plan as part of a service. The goal is to protect you from walking into responsibility that you did not price, and to help you position a safer next step for customers who think “we’re on Cloudflare so we’re good.”

Across this post you will see links to three supporting articles:
1. Cloudflare Business Plan Buyer’s Guide for SMBs
2. When to Leave Cloudflare Business
3. Cloudflare Pro vs Business: When to Upgrade, When to Rethink

You can use these with your customers to set expectations and avoid painful misunderstandings.

The Quiet Liability Problem for MSPs

When you sell Cloudflare, you are not just selling a product. You are selling safety.

Your customer is not buying “a CDN with a WAF.” Your customer is buying the belief that they are protected from live attacks, that they can pass a vendor security review, and that you will be reachable when something breaks.

That belief is sticky. It survives handoffs. It shows up in contracts. It shows up in renewals. Six months later when a login gets hammered by credential stuffing, or a carding bot hits checkout, or the site goes down because someone found and hit the origin directly, your customer will say “but you told us we were secure behind Cloudflare.”

Read that sentence again. They will not say “Cloudflare failed.” They will say “you told us we were secure.”

This is where most MSPs and MSSPs get exposed. Not technically. Commercially.

There are four promises that create that exposure.

We will go through each one. With each promise, we will also point out which of the three supporting articles you should send to the client to reset expectations before it becomes a renewal problem.

Risky Promise 1: “Bots are handled”

This usually starts with good intentions. You turn on Cloudflare Pro. You enable WAF rules. You enable Super Bot Fight Mode. You show a dashboard that says X thousand bad requests were challenged.

From the client’s point of view, the problem “bots” is now considered solved.

But many of the worst offenders for a growing business are not generic crawlers. They are targeted. Examples include:

• Automated credential stuffing against login
• Carding and checkout testing that runs stolen cards at volume
• Scripted scraping of prices, inventory, coupons, or loyalty balances
• Account takeover workflow abuse, like password reset abuse

Cloudflare Pro tier controls can challenge obvious automation and known bad sources. Cloudflare Business gives you more control and more rules. Both are still self-managed. They are broad protection, not tuned fraud defense. You are still the one expected to write the narrow rule that stops this specific attack without blocking real buyers.

If you call this “bot protection” and walk away, you create a false sense of safety. That false sense is what hurts you. The customer stops investing in fraud controls because “our MSP already solved bots using Cloudflare.”

Reduce that risk by sending them to “Cloudflare Pro vs Business: When to Upgrade, When to Rethink.”

That article does two things for you:

1. It explains what Pro is good at and where it starts failing once money flows through APIs, checkout, and login.
2. It frames Business as a step up in capability, but not a guarantee that targeted abuse is solved.

This matters because it tells your customer “basic bot mode is not the same as full fraud defense” in a way that does not make you look like you are backing out of a promise. It makes you look informed and honest.

Risky Promise 2: “Your uptime is guaranteed now”

Cloudflare Business advertises unmetered DDoS protection, stronger performance controls, fast global delivery, and a 100 percent uptime SLA on paper. Customers hear “our site cannot go down now and we have an SLA behind it.”

That is not how this plays out in real life for an MSP.

Here is what actually happens. A serious DDoS wave hits during a launch or campaign. Or an attacker discovers an expensive endpoint and forces resource exhaustion. Or a bad WAF rule breaks checkout for a segment of traffic. The customer calls you and expects immediate resolution. Not “we raised a support ticket.” They expect you to fix it.

If you are not staffed like a 24×7 SOC with authority to make production changes, that SLA talk turns into a personal escalation path to your phone.

Here is the hard line: if you repeat Cloudflare’s uptime language in your deck without clarifying who is actually on-call, you just wrote an SLA for yourself.

Reduce that risk by using “Cloudflare Business Plan Buyer’s Guide for SMBs” in your sales and onboarding conversations.

That article explains exactly what Cloudflare Business includes, what knobs you get, what kind of support you can expect, and in what scenarios it helps most. It also makes it clear that you still run it. You still own production safety. You still get the 2 a.m. call.

That lets you reframe the conversation with the customer from “we guarantee uptime” to “we are giving you stronger controls, but real-time response is still a service tier, not a default.”

That single change protects you.

Risky Promise 3: “Your origin cannot be hit directly now”

This one is subtle, but it is the source of some of the nastiest outages.

A lot of MSPs will say “your app is now behind Cloudflare” which the client translates to “attackers cannot get to our origin anymore.”

In practice, if the real server IP is still reachable on the internet, an attacker can bypass Cloudflare and hammer the origin directly. That can knock over the application, leak data, or make rate limiting at the edge meaningless.

Cloudflare Business gives you more flexibility around routing, partial setup, SSL, and custom rules. It is still not a magic switch that locks your origin instantly and permanently. Someone still has to maintain allowlists, pin traffic to known egress ranges, rotate and recheck IP exposure, and verify that new services and new subdomains are not accidentally exposed.

If you tell a customer “We put you behind Cloudflare, so you are safe,” and then they get hit directly at origin, you are the one who looks negligent, even if technically you never promised a full origin lockdown. This is how MSPs lose trust.

How to reduce that risk:

Again, point them to “Cloudflare Business Plan Buyer’s Guide for SMBs”

That piece walks through what Business adds on top of Pro. It helps customers understand that Business is giving them stronger tools, but not fully managed isolation of their origin. The value for you is that the article says it in a calm, factual way. You are not blaming Cloudflare. You are educating the client that “putting Cloudflare in front of you” and “making your origin unreachable to attackers” are two different levels of work.

That gives you space to position origin lockdown and traffic hardening as an additional managed service tier, not “already included in the monthly retainer.”

Risky Promise 4: “You are audit ready”

This one seems harmless at first. Your client has a big deal coming with an enterprise or with a regulated customer. A security questionnaire lands. They panic. You help them by saying “we have Cloudflare Business, it is PCI friendly, they talk about SOC 2, we are fine.”

Here is why this backfires.

Cloudflare Business gives you language that sounds good in questionnaires. WAF. DDoS protection. Script integrity controls. SLA. PCI. SOC 2 Type II. That helps the first round of vendor review.

It does not automatically generate ongoing evidence for audits. It does not package clean vulnerability reporting by severity and status. It does not track and present when a finding was virtually patched and how quickly that was addressed. It does not verify for you that block mode is running safely on live traffic without hurting real users. It does not include named experts who will walk an auditor through what happened and when.

When the buyer or auditor asks for that level of proof, most MSPs cannot supply it. At that point, you are either scrambling or stalling. Neither looks good in front of a CFO.

Reduce that risk by bringing in “When to Leave Cloudflare Business.”

That article is written for customers who are already on the Business plan and are still under pressure. It explains the moment when the game changes from “do we have the right features” to “who is operating this safely and can prove it.”

It introduces the idea of moving beyond Cloudflare Business to a managed WAAP model that:

• Goes live in block mode with a zero false positive expectation on production traffic
• Locks down the origin so direct-to-origin attacks die at the edge
• Rolls out virtual patches fast, without waiting on developer release cycles
• Produces audit friendly evidence and clean vulnerability reporting that leadership can sign off

For you, as an MSP, that article is your escalation path. It is the conversation you have when you realize the client now expects you to be their 24×7 SOC with board-ready reporting, but you did not sell that, and you cannot absorb that without burning margin.

You can point to “When to Leave Cloudflare Business” and say:
” You are now at the stage described here. This is not just about which Cloudflare plan you are on. This is about production ownership. You have two paths. You can move further up the Cloudflare stack and look at their Enterprise tier if you want to stay within that ecosystem. Or, if you want the same outcomes without the cost and overhead of going full Enterprise, we can bring in a managed partner that is built to do this for you and package that as part of our service.”

That is where you stop being the one who takes the hit and instead become the one who brings the fix.

How the Three Supporting Blogs Map to Your Customer Journey

If you serve SMBs or lower mid-market, your customers tend to fall into one of three stages. The three blogs you already have match those stages almost perfectly.

Stage 1: “We are on Cloudflare Pro right now. Are we fine, or should we go to Business”

Use: Cloudflare Pro vs Business: When to Upgrade, When to Rethink

Why this matters to you: It resets expectations around what Pro does and does not do without making you sound defensive. It also introduces the idea that jumping to Business is not just “pay more and forget it.” That saves you from being overpromising at the very first meeting.

Stage 2: “We think we will just pay for Cloudflare Business. That should cover uptime, DDoS, bot traffic, compliance, and audit questions”

Use: Cloudflare Business Plan Buyer’s Guide for SMBs

Why this matters to you: It walks them through Business in detail, in plain language. It makes it clear that Business is stronger than Pro, but still something they have to operate. You are not the bad guy here. The article is doing that heavy lift for you.

Stage 3: “We are already on Cloudflare Business, and we are still getting hammered. We want you to handle it. We need proof for auditors. We need a safe block mode in production without false positives. We need someone on call who can own it”

Use: When to Leave Cloudflare Business

Why this matters to you: This is the point where continuing to pretend you can cover this with “Cloudflare plus best effort support” is dangerous. That blog gives you language to introduce a managed WAAP layer that can take production ownership, produce audit quality evidence, and let you offer a higher tier service you can defend and price.

This becomes your customer enablement playbook.

The Opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs

There is a way to turn this from a liability into an advantage. Instead of selling “we turned on Cloudflare” as if that equals full application security; you can offer two tiers.

Tier 1: Cloudflare Pro or Cloudflare Business, configured and watched at a best effort level

In this tier, you are clear that you are enabling and tuning Cloudflare for the customer. You apply basic WAF rules, turn on available bot controls, improve performance, watch for obvious issues.

You are also clear on what is not included. Spell it out using “you get” vs “you do not get.”

What they get in Tier 1

• WAF rules applied and tuned at a basic level
• Standard bot and rate limiting features turned on
• CDN, caching, performance and page load improvements
• General monitoring for obvious production issues

What they do not get in Tier 1

• Guaranteed zero false positives in block mode on live checkout, login, or API traffic
• Origin lockdown that prevents attackers from bypassing Cloudflare and hitting the server IP directly
• Rapid virtual patching of new high-risk findings without waiting for code changes
• 24×7 incident response from security analysts
• Audit-ready evidence packs for customers, auditors, or the board

This keeps Tier 1 honest. You are saying “Cloudflare is enabled, tuned, and watched within reason.” You are not saying “we are now your SOC and compliance team.” That protects you when something serious happens.

Tier 2: Managed application and API protection with compliance-ready output

Tier 2 is where you move from “we set it up for you” to “we are actively protecting your websites and APIs and can prove it.”

What they get in Tier 2

• Origin lockdown so attackers cannot bypass the edge and hit the origin directly
• Live block mode in production with a stated zero false positive expectation
• Rapid virtual patching for critical findings, without waiting on product releases
• Continuous tuning and investigation by security analysts, not best-effort rule tweaks
• Fraud and abuse control on high-value flows like login, checkout, loyalty balance, coupon, and API endpoints
• Clean evidence you can hand to auditors, enterprise buyers, and leadership

Now, the positioning you care about:

Most MSPs assume that offering this level means either building a 24×7 SOC or forcing the client into classic enterprise models.

You do not have to frame it that way.

You can position Tier 2 in roughly the same spend band that the customer already expects.

That matters because:

• You are delivering Enterprise-style outcomes without forcing Enterprise-style contracts
• You are not pretending Tier 1 is more than it is
• You are creating a premium service tier you can defend, price, and renew without burning your team at 2 a.m.

This is the shift.
Tier 1 is baseline coverage.
Tier 2 is production ownership.

Once you say it this way, the customer understands the difference, and you stop inheriting unlimited risk for “just turning on Cloudflare.”

This is the real message of this post.

Cloudflare is not the problem. Overselling Cloudflare is the problem.

You do not have to stop offering Pro or Business. You just have to stop the customer from thinking that turning on Cloudflare Pro or Business means “we are fully protected, fully compliant, and someone will pick up the phone at 2 a.m.”

Make that shift and you protect your client, you protect yourself, and you open a higher value service line that is much harder for competitors to undercut.

We already work with 300+ partners worldwide, and we can slot in as your managed security layer starting now. Partner with us today and offer production-grade application and API protection without building a 24×7 SOC.

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