Looks like Cloudflare did change their minds later and offered to mitigate the attack pro bono:

> Following our initial quote from CloudFlare, we understand that some CloudFlare employees undertook a grassroots effort internally to convince the leadership to sponsor our needs, and eventually CloudFlare came back to us with an offer to sponsor our services for us free of charge. This was a very generous offer for which we are very appreciative; in the end we did not take them up on it as we had made substantial inroads towards an alternative solution by that time. I have had my reservations about CloudFlare in the past, but they were there for us in a time of need and I am grateful for that.