Surge play
Retail drops and Black Friday
When a SKU or sale goes live, demand arrives faster than checkout, inventory, or auth can absorb. TideGuard keeps the crowd in a fair line at the edge so the storefront only sees the admit rate you set.
What breaks without a waiting room
Flash sales and holiday opens share a failure mode: retries multiply, carts time out, and the origin that should complete purchases instead spends the window serving overload. Marketing traffic and bot scrapers arrive on the same paths as real buyers.
Platform and ecommerce leads usually know the peak shape weeks ahead. What they lack is a queue they own, can brand to the sale, and can cost out before the drop instead of explaining a surprise vendor invoice afterward.
How TideGuard holds the line
Visitors join a named FIFO queue (or a lottery pool when equal odds matter more than position). Heartbeats drop silent clients. Admission is a controlled rate with signed HMAC tokens so checkout can trust who earned a turn without a session database on the origin.
Origin proxy gates the sale paths at the edge. Unauthenticated traffic hits the waiting room; admitted traffic continues upstream. Staff IP allowlist and Pass queue keep ops and QA out of the public line without consuming admit capacity.
Operator controls for the sale window
The control room covers branding preview, traffic pacing, live queue depth, and a ~24h traffic chart. Temporary country block with a TTL helps when a promotion is region-limited; allowlist and Pass queue still override.
Because the software is MIT open source, the bill you plan is Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects on your account. Use the cost calculator to size the crowd before Black Friday, then deploy from GitHub when you are ready.
Next steps
Review the waiting room demos, check capabilities, or estimate Cloudflare cost for your crowd size. Other surge shapes: ticket onsales, and viral launches.