I’m unhappy with Cloudflare for API abuse detection

Understood. If Cloudflare isn’t giving you the API abuse detection you need, the better path is usually to move from “generic edge protection” to a setup that combines API-specific controls, behavioral detection, and app-level signals.

A few practical directions:

What to look for instead

• API gateways with abuse controls: rate limits, quota plans, token-based policies, per-client throttles.
• Bot/abuse detection vendors: ones that score traffic using device fingerprinting, request patterns, and behavioral anomalies.
• WAF + SIEM integration: so detections can be tuned using your own logs and business logic.
• App-level safeguards: per-account limits, velocity checks, anomaly scoring, and step-up auth.

Important features for API abuse

• Per-user / per-key / per-IP rate limiting
• Burst detection and sliding windows
• Token replay detection
• Credential stuffing and account takeover signals
• Graph/anomaly detection across endpoints
• Custom rules for high-risk endpoints
• Good logs and exportability

Common better-fit stacks

• API gateway: Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management
• WAF/bot mitigation: Fastly, DataDome, Radware, Akamai, Imperva
• Behavior analytics: custom pipeline in Datadog, Splunk, Elastic, or a dedicated fraud platform

If you want to replace Cloudflare specifically

You can:

1. Put an API gateway in front of your services
2. Add bot/abuse detection at the edge or gateway
3. Feed logs into a detection system
4. Enforce decisions in the gateway and application layer

Next step

If you want, I can help you compare alternatives based on:

• your API traffic volume
• whether abuse is bots, scraping, credential stuffing, or token abuse
• your cloud stack
• budget
• need for real-time blocking vs. detection only

If you tell me what kind of abuse you’re seeing, I can recommend a more precise replacement strategy.