One of them actually recently looked into building their own solution. However, they realized, that in order to create something really valuable, you need at least a couple of months of dedicated engineering efforts of people who really understand GraphQL.
Our automatic and powerful cache invalidation - currently only possible with Fastly, a whole GraphQL-specific Analytics solution and a Security suite is nothing you can quickly clone.
Anyone of course can, but you need a highly GraphQL-specific product with many workflows like CLI workflows to upload your GraphQL Schema etc - it requires quite a bit of thinking and engineering to make that work.
IMO if you get traction, you would be wise to take an early acquisition offer from Fastly or Cf. I was an early double digits engineer at Cloudflare and I can tell you, you REALLY don’t want to build a CDN to try to compete. Love them to death but look at ImgIX as a case study of how not to bizdev this same business model.
Also, don’t entertain the idea that you can compete with a DIY VM-based “Cloud CDN”, it’s really not comparable. Look at the many dead “mobile first” CDN startups of 2014-2018, as case studies.
Lastly, if you guys create a caching query planner on the edge, you might have a head start on a completely unmatched (afaik) product as an intelligent graphQL “gslb”. As a customer, if I can move my user data geographically closer to my users, that’s a big win for many reasons.
Best of luck!