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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

I think Cloudflare is (for companies already using it) approaching the status of trusted main cloud supplier (which usually would be AWS, GCP, Azure) via which the majority of cloud costs are billed (so you don't have to go through a fresh procurement process).

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I don't know what you mean by "trusted", but how many times do folks have to go through the same loop?

   - Company has great initial product
   - Company gets popular
   - Shareholders demand infinite growth
   - Company becomes rent-seeker
   - GOTO 10

I'm with OP - a company that wants to insert itself in the middle of everybody's business is not being altruistic, they're playing the long game.

> I don't know what you mean by "trusted",

It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".

There is nothing wrong with “inserting yourself in the middle of everybody’s business”. That is how you reduce friction between parties and make optimizations that are only possible by being able to manage both sides of the connection. It’s also a really good way to make money.

Well... there's "nothing wrong" with being a car dealership either. "Wrong" is a funny way to look at it.

Car dealerships are legally mandated in most US states. Cloud services, thankfully, not yet.

CloudFlare is FedRAMP high. This is a pretty big deal for a lot of a certain type of system owners.

Folks are heavily discounting cloudflare here and it would outshine AWS shortly and here's why:

1. Due to AI, most of the software is going to be personal apps.

2. For personal apps, (even most commercial SaaS) SQLite is all you need.

3. The Javascript ecosystem is huge in terms of components, libraries. ShadCN and what not.

4. Cloudflare has workers, durable objects which is isolated SQLite, D1 which is isolated SQLite

5. You can run crons, long running jobs, cloudlflare has emails.

6. Cloudlflare has best in class open weigh AI models as API for cheap.

7. Cloudflare has amazing CLI wrnagler but upcoming cf is purpose built for agentic workflows.

8. The built in AI assistant is really really good in guiding you how to setup, architecture and work around limitations etc.

Combine all the above, in next 5 years Cloureflare is going to get stronger with more workloads deployed to it then all three hyper clouds combined.

none of the things you listed are needed for personal apps, for personal apps you dont need internet, at worse you just need dyndns.

9. None of this matters, because personal apps will use none of that because individual personal customers are way cheaper than organizations, and will use whatever is included in their subscriptions (e.g. ChatGPT Sites).

hm, I wonder what powers ChatGPT Sites ;) it's Cloudflare all the way down.

This practice of having the one provider should be eliminated. Companies self-inflict lock-in to large platform providers, prevent their own teams from using better technology options and stifle innovation. It's crazy that even with a pile of SOC/ISO/PCI/HIPAA/NIS certificates, procurement is still a months-long process, it should be much easier to do business.

It doesn't help that a lot of companies want to sniff out how much cash the customer has before even showing any terms and pricing.

I think their strategy is: "AI coding means we can build everything. Our infrastructure approach is incredibly quick to build upon, so why not build it all ourselves and then anyone with half a brain will move their stuff to Cloudflare and leave AWS in the dust."

Replace trusted with convenient. They're glowing pretty hard giving out all that stuff very cheap in exchange for being the middle man on everything. Not that I mind for my trivial use case.

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