Over the past couple of years, we have piloted a program for early stage startups with free access to a selection of developer products that are high leverage for them. Last year, we launched version 2 of the startup program, which dramatically expanded the basket of products included.

While upgrading startups to the startup plan, I often get inquiries from startups that are fully bootstrapped and not affiliated with any accelerator program. Many of them, especially AI startups, are very promising and would benefit highly from the startup plan.

Typically, they also apply for the Workers Launchpad program, for whom semi-finalists can get upgraded to the startup plan as a benefit. But many of those startups would benefit from getting upgraded right away rather than wait for the review process for each cohort.

Starting today, AI startups no longer need an accelerator affiliation or an employee referral in order to qualify for the Startup Program.

Here’s what I need you to do if you are a founder of a bootstrapped AI startup. Create a Cloudflare account if you don’t have one, add a domain, and update the name servers.

Fill out this form with the email address associated with your Cloudflare account: form here. For accelerator, select “AI” from the dropdown menu. In the Comments section, include the following information:

• Indication that the startup has raised less than $3M USD (e.g., link to Crunchbase).

• Link to a landing page, pitch deck, or article that describes what the startup does. It should be apparent from these materials that the startup is an AI startup (e.g. mention LLMs if that’s what you’re using).

• Which Cloudflare developer products are you using.

We can’t wait to see what you’re all building!

Starting a business is hard. And we know that the first few years of your business are crucial to your success.

Cloudflare’s Startup Plan is here to help.

Last year, we piloted a program to a select group of startups for free, with a selection of products that are very high leverage for young startups, early in their product development, like Workers, Stream, and Zero Trust.

Over the past year, startup founders repeatedly wrote into startups@cloudflare.com, and most of these emails followed one of 2 patterns:

1. A startup would like to request additional products that are not a part of the startup plan, often Workers KV, Pages, Cloudflare for SaaS, R2, Argo, etc.

2. A startup that is not a part of any accelerator program but would like to get on the startup plan.

Based on this feedback, we are thrilled to announce that today we will be increasing the scope of the program to also include popularly requested products! Beyond that, we’re also super excited to be broadening the eligibility criteria, so more startups can qualify for the plan.

There’s a lot of additional value that’s in the latest version of the plan. Here’s how things have evolved from v1.0:

^* Product-specific usage limits apply

^** The above listed products and enablement video training are included in the startup plan. Occasionally, for some products, to help with the complexities of setting up some products, enterprise customers typically purchase an additional onboarding support package (which is not included in the startup plan, but is available for purchase). Products that commonly need additional onboarding support include: Aegis, Custom Tiered Cache, Argo Tunnels for Load Balancers, Magic Transit (adding and removing subnets), BYOIP / static IP, Dedicated Gateway IP, FedRAMP Setup.

With the expanded product basket, the Startup Plan v2.0 provides four times the value of the original program. As an added bonus when new Cloudflare products are in beta, participants on the Startup Plan are welcome to share their use case and potentially receive early access.

To be eligible for the Startup Plan, your startup must be at an early stage (i.e. raised less than $3 million) and enrolled or recently graduated from a participating accelerator program.

If you are a founder in a participating accelerator program, navigate to the Cloudflare perk from your program’s vendor perk page and follow the instructions there. Those instructions will lead you to this plan page where you can select your program from the list.

Join Cloudflare Startup Plan

If your accelerator program is not on the list, please email us at startups+partner@cloudflare.com and include the details of your perk manager. We’ll get in touch with them directly.

Yes! Startups currently on the Startup Plan will automatically have the additional products added to your accounts in the coming weeks, no action required. This upgrade will apply for the remainder of the year that your company is on the Startup Plan.

If you have any questions about making the most of your plan, drop a line to startups+upgrade@cloudflare.com with any questions.

Over our years at Cloudflare, we have had the privilege of working with some remarkable technologists who have gone on to work on extraordinary projects after their time at Cloudflare. Moreover, there are startup founders who interface with teams at Cloudflare, whether through participation in the Cloudflare Community or because they were former coworkers elsewhere.

These startups are now also eligible:

• Workers Launchpad funding program: If you are building on Cloudflare Workers, simultaneously apply for the Workers Launchpad funding program here, which will make you eligible for introductions to leading investors, additional mentorship opportunities, and other perks.

• Referral Program: “Referred by (include details in comments)” is now an option in the Select Accelerator dropdown menu on the Startup Plan landing page. Please include the email address of your contact at Cloudflare in the comments field. Your account will be upgraded once your contact validates the referral.

• Alumni Program: “Cloudflare Alumni” is now also an option in the Select Accelerator dropdown menu.

Join Cloudflare Startup Plan

Questions about the program? Drop us a line at startups@cloudflare.com, and we’ll be in touch.

Early in the life of most startups, there is a time of incredible hustle, creative problem solving, and making the impossible possible through out-of-the-box thinking and elbow grease. Grizzled veterans, who have lived through those days of running on coffee and shoestring budgets, look back on that time and fascinate the newcomers with war stories of back in the day, of adventures and first wins, when they kept the lights on by sheer force of will.

To help early stage startups get going, Cloudflare is giving away one year of the Startup Enterprise plan to all early stage startups in participating accelerator programs. That early stage time is special for product development, and entrepreneurs unlock worlds of possibilities when they have advanced tools on their hands, such as the power of the Cloudflare network.

In addition to the core offerings in the Pro and Business plans (e.g., CDN, DNS, WAF, custom SSL cert, 50 page rules), when founders sign up for the Startup Enterprise plan they’ll get special access to:

• Cloudflare Workers: 50 million requests / month.

  • Deploy serverless code instantly across the globe to give it exceptional performance, reliability, and scale.

• Cloudflare for Teams: 50 seats.

  • Zero Trust security platform, unified network security as-a-service built natively into the Cloudflare network

• Cloudflare Stream: 500K min/month; 100K minutes storage.

  • An affordable, scalable, on-demand video platform with simple, comprehensive APIs.

Additionally, when there are new Cloudflare products that are still in early access, participants on the Startup Enterprise plan can tell us about their use case for the product managers’ consideration for early access.

To be eligible for the Startup Enterprise plan, a startup must be currently enrolled in a participating accelerator program or be a recent graduate. Additional eligibility criteria will be listed on the vendor perk info page of the accelerator program.

• If you are a founder in a participating accelerator program, find the Cloudflare perk from your program’s vendor perk page and follow the instructions there.

• If you are a founder in a program that is not yet a partner, drop us a line at startups@cloudflare.com, or ask the folks who run the vendor perk program at your accelerator program to drop us a line at startups@cloudflare.com.If you run or work for an accelerator program, or are friends with folks who do, do drop us a line at startups@cloudflare.com. We’d love to make our tools available to your portfolio companies.

In the United States, May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. This year, we wanted to celebrate this occasion in a more inclusive and comprehensive way, which is why we called our celebration APAC Heritage Month. This initiative was a collaboration between Desiflare and Asianflare, Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for employees of Asian descent. We are proud to have run a diverse slate of events and content that we had planned throughout this month of celebration.

Our priority for APAC Heritage Month has been to share the stories and experiences of those in our community: we hosted several different segments to highlight the strong culture and heritage with moderated panels. We also took this opportunity to highlight some of the leaders in the industry of APAC descent around the world, to talk about their journey and struggles, so we can learn from each other and grow to be inspired. Although there has been progress in the past several years regarding representation of APAC stories being told, this small handful of narratives have a hard time representing two thirds of the world. By telling a more diverse set of APAC stories — our own, from immigrants, stories about food, culture and our careers — we hope to bring visibility to our experiences and our existence.

To keep everyone safe during the pandemic, all of our external events this year have been virtual and televised on Cloudflare TV:

• The Asian American Experience: a CFTV series on the collective experience of Asian Americans.

  • The Youth of Today: a moderated panel discussion of young Cloudflarians on the experience of both first and second generation young Asian Americans.

  • Culinary Experiences: an exploration of cuisine and it’s bidirectional influence with Asian American culture.

  • The Asian-American Experience: Past, Present, Future: Christine Hung, VP, Data and Engineering, Flatiron Health, will share the story of her career, and the path she took to be where she is today.

• Coming of Age: a guided exploration through large cultural concepts and concerns that folks of Asian heritage stay cognizant of as they go through life.

  • One Child Policy: an in-depth exploration of the PRC’s One Child Policy.

  • Model Minorities: a critical review of the contentious idea/myth.

  • Filial Piety and Familial Responsibility: an examination of intergenerational relations and how that’s changing.

• Founder Focus: a spotlight on the human stories behind startup founders.

  • Quinn Wang - Quinn Wang is the founder of Quadrant Eye, a convenient way to renew your eye prescription online and get your glasses or contact lens prescription emailed to you.

  • Angus Luk - Angus Luk is the founder of EventX, Asia's leading virtual events platform. We'll be discussing everything from pivoting during the pandemic, to the trade-off of in-person, virtual, or hybrid events in different places around the world.

  • Beyang Liu - Beyang Liu co-founded Sourcegraph, a web-based code search and navigation tool for dev teams.

  • Kathy Zhou - Kathy Zhou is founder and CTO of Queenly, the largest marketplace for formalwear, from prom, pageant, to all evening gowns.

  • Jeremy Lam - Jeremy Lam is founder and CEO of Venu, a YC startup focused on virtual trade shows, expo halls, and hybrid events. We'll be discussing everything from the economics of trade shows, the impact of the pandemic, and predictions for the future.

• Fireside Chats: a chat set to explore the different careers of Asians in influential positions and what their experiences are of getting there.

  • Christine Hung, VP, Data and Engineering, Flatiron Health.

  • Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, hardware hacker, author, researcher, mentor to hardware startups.

  • Oli Yu, Engineering Director at Cloudflare.

  • Mohit Bijlani, EMEA Sales Manager at Cloudflare.

  • Roy Lo, EMEA Sales Manager at Cloudflare.

  • Christine Starkman, researcher and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

  • Andy Nallappan, CTO and Head of Software Business Operations at Broadcom.

  • Andrew Li, Engineering Manager at Cloudflare.

• We Are Cloudflare: Interviews with the people behind the scenes that make Cloudflare what it is. Join Chaat as he interviews people from across all teams and offices. Get to know what they do and the kind of people we are.

• Cooking with Cloudflare: a live segment from our kitchens where we learn to make a dish or two from a Cloudflarian somewhere around the world.

• A Mile in Your Shoes: A story about their family's migration, their childhood pets, education and unique experiences, to better understand the lives of our colleagues.

Check out our APAC Heritage month landing page for the recordings of the events that occurred this month. We wanted to celebrate this month and truly embrace the culture and diversity, so please watch the recordings back on Cloudflare TV and beyond. Cloudflare embraces diversity and values diverse teams. We have also taken the recommendations of our teammates and put together a Playlist for you to be inspired by and deep dive into the deep rooted culture and practices we have celebrated this month.

In the spirit of highlighting APAC voices, we also wanted to take this opportunity to share a little about how our Asianflare and Desiflare Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) got started.

In March 2020, I (Jade) was having lunch with my colleague Stanley. We were venting to each other about the family of four who had been attacked in a grocery store parking lot in Texas. A few other co-workers joined the conversation, and we got to talk about how it echoed experiences of growing up as a minority in the US with Asian heritage.

That day turned out to be one of the last times we would physically be together in an office.

Stanley and I created Asianflare, the employee resource group for Asian heritage at Cloudflare, when we realized that we needed a space to serve as a support group. Surely, we weren’t the only ones who needed an emotional outlet about current events that impact our demographic. And we had a feeling that things were going to get worse before they got better. In the beginning, we just needed a safe space to just share our experiences with each other. And as lockdowns began across all the offices across the world, the Asianflare community became a real social hub as casual office chatter vanished into the ether.

The community blossomed with every food photo, every music or movie recommendation, every article discussion. We celebrated festivals together, held Zoom Lo Hei (“Prosperity Toss”) in multiple time zones, and held fireside chats on everything from career advice to public policy. Remember when WeChat and TikTok looked like they might be banned in the U.S.? We organized an internal fireside chat with Alissa Starzak, our public policy expert, to answer our questions on what to expect, especially those of us who feared getting cut off from our friends and family. On the average day, though, about 80% of our conversations are about food.

In March 2021, amidst the background radiation of escalating anti-Asian hate, a shooter killed eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. What changed this time was the social support structures we had in place. We have a community that can grieve together, just as much as we celebrate together. Our People Team connected us with group therapy sessions offered by one of our benefits providers. At the BEER meeting our CEO, Matthew Prince, not only brought awareness to the issues and what our community was experiencing, but also offered our physical security team’s help. Even when I went outside, the flags were flying at half-mast. Colleagues I hadn’t heard from in ages reached out to make sure we were OK.

I know now that a kid like me growing up today would not see their families’ experiences swept under the rug, because our experiences are a part of the conversation now.

At the San Francisco office in 2019, we started to notice a sizable number of both folks of South Asian origin and folks with a deep interest in South Asian culture. So during Diwali (a festival of lights), we decided to have a small lunch get-together. The precursor to Desiflare was thus born in a room with 25 people congregating together for a commemorative vegetarian meal. The success of this small event led to monthly lunch meetings and eventually the formalization of the Desiflare ERG. Given the sizable Desi presence across all of our offices and the expansive interest we’ve seen in Desi culture across Cloudflare, today we see our ERG heavily represented around the world, especially in San Francisco, Austin, NYC, London, and Singapore!

Our Mission is to “Foster a sense of belonging and community amongst Cloudflare employees with an interest in the rich South Asian Culture as a platform to bring people together.”

We welcome everyone who identifies with or is otherwise interested in South Asian culture and look forward to welcoming all into our Desi community! While we are bound by the common fabric of South Asian, we realize that South Asia is vast and varied. Our shared body of culture embraces a breadth of diverse traditions, cuisines, habits, and beliefs, which is only magnified by the variation across the Desi diaspora across the world.

We therefore aspire to embrace and learn about each other to make the Desiflare ERG a place where all feel welcome!

Photo of Indian Spices, by Joe mon bkk. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Share your Cloudflare Workers recipes with the Cloudflare Community. Developers in Cloudflare’s community each bring a unique perspective that would yield use cases our core team could never have imagined. That is why we invite you to share Workers recipes that are useful in your own work, life, or hobby.

We’ve created a new tag “Recipe Exchange” in the Workers section of the Cloudflare Community Forum. We invite you to share your work, borrow / get inspired by the work of others, and upvote useful recipes written by others in the community.

Recipe Exchange in Cloudflare Community

We will be highlighting interesting and/or popular recipes (with author permission) in the coming months right here in this blog.

Cloudflare Workers let you run JavaScript in Cloudflare’s hundreds of data centers around the world. Using a Worker, you can modify your site’s HTTP requests and responses, make parallel requests, or generate responses from the edge. Cloudflare Workers has been in open beta phase since February 1st. Read more about the launch in this blog post.

Cloudflare has an incredibly powerful global network of 151 data centers, where you can put compute anywhere and you can write with a language you’re familiar with (JavaScript) with a standard API you're familiar with (Service Workers). You can move your compute to be super low latency, to be much nearer to your end user, your database, your embedded device, or anything else you want faster round trips for.

You may access and leverage the power of Cloudflare’s network for your next applications or as an add-on for optimizing the performance of your existing projects by running JavaScript on Cloudflare’s edge network.

The next product that leverages Cloudflare's infrastructure to create security, performance, usability, and other optimizations for the Internet should have the lowest possible barriers to entry. Millions of customers should have access to those products on day one. That's how the Internet should work.

For inspiration, the Workers core team baked up some recipes to highlight a few popular use cases:

• A/B Testing You can create a Cloudflare Worker to control A/B tests.

• Aggregating Multiple Requests Here, we make multiple requests to different API endpoints, aggregate the responses and send it back as a single response.

• Conditional Routing The easiest way to deliver different content based on the device being used is to rewrite the URL of the request based on the condition you care about.

• Custom responses that don't hit origin servers You can return responses directly from the edge. No need to hit your origin.

• Hot-link Protection You can use Cloudflare Workers to protect your hot-links on your web properties.

• Post Requests Reading content from an HTTP POST request

• Random Content Cookies You can create random content cookies using Cloudflare Workers.

• Signed Requests A common URL authentication method known as request signing1 can be implemented in a worker with the help of the Web Crypto API.

• Streaming Responses Minimize the visitor’s time-to-first-byte and the amount of buffering done in the worker script.

That’s great! I’ve created this thread in the Cloudflare Community forum so anyone can submit a recipe idea, comment on one, and anyone can volunteer to write a recipe that there is a ready audience for.

Share your recipe in the Community Recipe Exchange

There’s a special place in our heart for all the open source projects that support the Internet and improve the lives of everyone in the developer community, and today seems like an appropriate time to express the gratitude we have for the non-profit / volunteer-run projects that hold everything together.

Cloudflare uses a lot of open source software and also contributes to open source. Informally, Cloudflare has already been upgrading the plans of certain eligible open source projects that have reached out to us or that we have interfaced with. Here are some of the projects whose landing pages are already protected by Cloudflare.

To really pay the goodwill forward, we want to make this opportunity common knowledge in the developer community. In 2018, we intend to provide free Cloudflare Pro Plan upgrades to eligible open source projects (subject to a case-by-case evaluation) that:

1. provide engineering tools or resources to the developer community; and

2. are volunteer-run or working on a non-profit basis.

Are you an open source project using @Cloudflare? We want to give you a free Pro Plan to thank you for your work for the community.  ? -> os-sponsorship@cloudflare.com Please RT!

— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) January 30, 2018

Making core contributions to a qualifying open source project? Drop a line to os-sponsorship@cloudflare.com with a link to the project’s landing page, repo, and a description of what engineering tools or resources your project provides to the developer community.

And please RT this opportunity, and share it with all the open source contributors in your life. Thanks!

JS Conf EU 2016. Photo by Holger Blank.

If you’re at JS Conf EU (May 6-7) or CSS Conf EU (May 5):

• Be sure to make it to John Fawcett’s session, “Invisible Code: Building JavaScript Libraries For Non-Technical People.”

• Made a Cloudflare App? Drop by the Cloudflare Hacker Lounge to show me and I have a special gift for you.

• Started working on a Cloudflare App and have questions? Drop by the Cloudflare Hacker Lounge and get them answered.

Just happen to be in Berlin? Tweet @qiqing and @IcyApril to come hang out with us in person.

Cloudflare Apps Preview. Visualize your app here.

Join the core developers of Cloudflare Apps for the inaugural Cloudflare meetup in Austin. It will feature an introduction by Zack Bloom (tech lead) to the new Cloudflare Apps including details of how apps get created, moderated, installed, and served to millions of users all over the world.

Bring your laptops!

What: Zack Bloom: “How to make a Cloudflare App: Developer Preview”Where: Capital Factory, 701 Brazos St Ste 1601, Austin, TXWhen: Thursday, May 11, 2017; 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

RSVP on meetup.com >>

Core devs will be on-hand to help answer questions and serve as teaching assistants. T-shirts and dinner for every attendee. Special goodies for everyone who makes and tests an app.

Eric Teffen Ellis (core dev) will be live-coding a Cloudflare App, followed by Q&A. Bring your laptops! New coders and new friends welcome. Say hi, make noise, and ask questions.

What: Eric Teffen Ellis: “Building apps for the web with Cloudflare.”Where: Vacasa, 926 NW 13th Ave #200, Portland, ORWhen: Thursday, May 11, 2017; 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

RSVP for PDX Node on meetup.com >>

T-shirts and pizza for everyone.

Want to host a Cloudflare event? Want to request a speaker to teach Cloudflare Apps to your group? Drop a line to community@cloudflare.com.

CC-BY 2.5 image by Hans Braxmeier

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a faster and more secure Internet for everyone, but sometimes sites often lack the accessibility features critical to allowing all Internet users to enjoy their content and perspective. Cloudflare Apps, which power the add-ons featured here, can allow developers to enhance any website. Get notified for the developer preview >>

The team at Cloudflare is excited to announce the release of two performance-enhancing features that makes the Internet more usable for two underrepresented demographics on the Internet: cats and Australians.

The modern internet is full of content which challenges our perspectives. Often though, we are not interested in being challenged, we are interested in cats. To use the internet, to be a member of this incredible cultural fabric, is to find the most feline part of yourself. A love of sleeping, of curling up on a soft pile of destroyed clothing, a love of distracting and bothering others. Often though, websites just fail to recognize this critical part of our identity.

We believe access to the internet is a basic human right. It’s not enough to just be able to access it though, it also needs to be reliable, fast, and accessible. One area where this is particularly pressing is Australia. Their latitude and upside-downness can make browsing the Internet of the Northern Hemisphere a nightmare. Imagine living your life with every image, every video, every Ryan Gosling is upside down. Imagine January is the middle of summer, and shivering with the cold of July. Today we are introducing another performance-enhancing feature: Australia mode.

Cloudflare Apps is a simple and powerful way for millions of site operators to one-click install tools previously only available to technical experts, and it powers the two modes demonstrated above. For developers, you can deliver your client-side and SaaS tools to millions of websites as a Cloudflare add-on, including a mechanism for monetization through the Cloudflare Apps marketplace. And your app does not have to be specialized for cats or Australians. Get a head start by participating in the developer preview.