We spend Birthday Week every year releasing the products and capabilities we believe the Internet needs at this moment and around the corner. Previous Birthday Weeks saw the launch of IPv6 gateway in 2011,  Universal SSL in 2014, Cloudflare Workers and unmetered DDoS protection in 2017, Cloudflare Radar in 2020, R2 Object Storage with zero egress fees in 2021,  post-quantum upgrades for Cloudflare Tunnel in 2022, Workers AI and Encrypted Client Hello in 2023. And those are just a sample of the launches.

This year’s themes focused on helping prepare the Internet for a new model of monetization that encourages great content to be published, fostering more opportunities to build community both inside and outside of Cloudflare, and evergreen missions like making more features available to everyone and constantly improving the speed and security of what we offer.

We shipped a lot of new things this year. In case you missed the dozens of blog posts, here is a breakdown of everything we announced during Birthday Week 2025. 

Monday, September 22

Tuesday, September 23

Wednesday, September 24

Thursday, September 25

Friday, September 26

Helping build a better Internet has always been about more than just technology. Like the announcements about interns or working together in our offices, the community of people behind helping build a better Internet matters to its future. This week, we rolled out our most ambitious set of initiatives ever to support the builders, founders, and students who are creating the future.

For founders and startups, we are thrilled to welcome Cohort #6 to the Workers Launchpad, our accelerator program that gives early-stage companies the resources they need to scale. But we’re not stopping there. We’re opening our doors, literally, by launching new physical hubs for startups in our San Francisco, Austin, London, and Lisbon offices. These spaces will provide access to mentorship, resources, and a community of fellow builders.

We’re also investing in the next generation of talent. We announced free access to the Cloudflare developer platform for all students, giving them the tools to learn and experiment without limits. To provide a path from the classroom to the industry, we also announced our goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026 — our biggest commitment yet to fostering future tech leaders.

And because a better Internet is for everyone, we’re extending our support to non-profits and public-interest organizations, offering them free access to our production-grade developer tools, so they can focus on their missions.

Whether you're a founder with a big idea, a student just getting started, or a team working for a cause you believe in, we want to help you succeed.

Thank you to our customers, our community, and the millions of developers who trust us to help them build, secure, and accelerate the Internet. Your curiosity and feedback drive our innovation.

It’s been an incredible 15 years. And as always, we’re just getting started!

(Watch the full conversation on our show ThisWeekinNET.com about what we launched during Birthday Week 2025 here.)

Prior to 2020, we expected essentially every team member of Cloudflare to be present in one of our offices five days a week. That worked well for us and helped facilitate the launch of dozens of technologies as well as a community and culture that defined who we are.

Like every other team on the planet, the COVID pandemic forced us to revisit that approach. We used the time to think about what our offices could be, in a world where not every team member showed up every day of the week. While we decided we would be open to remote and hybrid work, we still felt like some of our best work was done in person together. The goal became building spaces that encouraged team members to be present.

Several hard hats and a few leases later, we’ve created a network of offices around the world designed to evolve with the way people work. These spaces aren’t just places to sit — they’re environments that empower people to do their best work — whether that means quiet focus, creative problem-solving, or lively collaboration. From a library tucked into a quiet zone in our waterfront Lisbon office, to the high-ceilinged collaboration areas in the heart of Austin, each office reflects our belief that great spaces support diverse working styles and help teams thrive together.

Our offices are meant to connect our teams, and we believe that by opening our doors to the wider community, we can foster even more innovation and help new companies collaborate better. Cloudflare has always been a hub for builders, and now we're making that commitment official by welcoming startups into our physical spaces.

Our spaces have served as hosts to community events since the earliest days of Cloudflare. We have brought together just about every group from hackathons to language meet-ups to university orientation sessions. Cloudflare exists to help build a better Internet and in many cases a better digital environment starts with relationships built in a real life environment.

One of the most common pieces of feedback we have received in the last few years after hosting these events is “I really miss connecting with people like this.” And we hear that most often from small teams in the earliest stages of their journey. In the last few years as the start-ups we support with our platform increasingly begin remote-first and only open dedicated spaces in later stages of their growth.

We know that building a company can be a lonely path. We have helped over the last several years by providing a robust free plan and a comprehensive start-up program, but we think we can do more.

Cloudflare’s network supports a significant percentage of the Internet and, as you would expect, the Internet follows the sun. More people use it during the daytime than at night, meaning our data center utilization peaks in specific times of the day. We take advantage of that pattern to run services that are less latency-sensitive in regions overnight.

Our physical locations follow a similar pattern. Utilization resembles a bell curve with Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays seeing a lot of traffic while Mondays and Fridays tend to be quieter. Like our CPUs at night, we think we can use that excess capacity to help build a better Internet by giving builders a space to congregate and helping our team connect with more of our users.

Beginning in January of 2026, we plan to make our office locations available to a capped number of external visitors as all-day coworking spaces on select days of each week. We will provide a registration process (more on that below) and set some ground rules. To start, we plan to expand this offering to San Francisco, Austin, London, and Lisbon.

When external visitors arrive, they’ll have access to our common spaces to bring together their teams or just get some work done by themselves. No mandatory talks or obligations. Just fantastic working spaces available to use at no cost.

We will provide more details in the next few weeks, but the general structure will be based on the following steps.

1. Enroll in the Cloudflare for Startups Program. Bonus if you are a Workers Launchpad participant or alumni.

2. Sit tight for now. We will email participating Startup Program customers first to participate with a form requesting office access.

3. Once the form is filled out, a member of our team will reach out after. If you want to get a head start, fill out the form here.

4. We plan to roll this out on a cohort basis. Once approved and all requirements are met, register your visit (and that of any additional team members) at least three business days prior to the date requested.

5. Respect our working spaces as you would your own.

We hope to expand to other locations in the future. Want to get to the front of the line? Sign up for our Startup program here today and we will reach out to Startup Program participants before we roll out the program.

Our startup programs remove those barriers, so founders can focus on what matters the most: building products, finding customers, and growing a business. Cloudflare for Startups launched in 2018 to provide enterprise-level application security and performance services to growing startups. As we built out our Developer Platform, we pivoted last year to offer founders up to $250,000 in cloud credits to build on our Developer Platform for up to one year.

During Birthday Week 2022, we announced our Cloudflare Workers Launchpad Program with an initial $1.25 billion in potential funding for startups building on Cloudflare Workers, made possible through partnerships with 26 leading venture capital (VC) firms. Within months, we expanded VC-backed funding to $2 billion.

Since 2022, we’ve welcomed 145 startups from 23 countries. These startups are solving problems across verticals such as AI and machine learning, developer tools, 3D design, cloud infrastructure, data tools, ad tech, media, logistics, finance, and other industries. We’re especially proud of the female founder representation in recent cohorts — with nearly a third of companies in Cohort #5 run by a female founder. 

Participants engaged in bootcamp sessions with Cloudflare leadership and product teams, covering key topics like product pricing and scaling sales. Startups received hands-on design support from our Solutions Architecture team, empowering these builders to build and scale their full-stack applications on the Cloudflare network. We facilitate countless introductions across the VC network, and are happy to see funding and M&A activity as these startups scale. Cloudflare also identified direct opportunities and acquired Nefeli Networks (Cohort #2) and Outerbase (Cohort #4).

Check out what Launchpad alumni have to say about their experience in the program:

Langbase (Cohort #3) Ship hyper-personalized AI apps to any LLM, any data, any developer in seconds

"For Langbase, the best part about Workers Launchpad was the incredible support from Cloudflare’s internal teams. It wasn’t just about access to infrastructure; it was the hands-on migration help, rapid feedback loops, and genuine partnership from engineers, product folks, and the broader Cloudflare community. That human support empowered us to iterate faster, solve hard problems, and truly feel like we were building something impactful together. 

Langbase has quickly become one of the most powerful serverless AI clouds for building and deploying AI agents. We process 700 TB of agent memory and 1.2 billion AI agent runs a month. Langbase is an agent lab, and we’ve also launched a coding agent called Command.new, an "agent of agents" that can take your prompts and turn them into production-ready agents by provisioning infrastructure and writing the agent's code in TypeScript.

My advice for anyone joining future Workers Launchpad cohorts is to use every resource offered. Engage deeply with the Cloudflare teams, ask for feedback early and often, and be open to sharing your challenges and wins, especially in the Discord community, which is super helpful. Cloudflare listens closely to participant feedback and genuinely wants to help startups succeed. Treat it as a two-way conversation and a collaborative growth opportunity. This mindset is what unlocks the real power of the program."

-Ahmad Awais, Founder & CEO of Langbase

Sherpo.io (Cohort #4) AI-first no-code platform to build and sell digital content

“Since joining Cohort #4, we’ve exited closed beta and expanded our product suite for content creators. Today, more than 3,000 creators worldwide power their digital product stores with Sherpo, while we continue building and scaling.

We learned as much from fellow startups as from Cloudflare during office hours and sessions, and we got to meet incredible people along the way, including Cloudflare’s CSO, Stephanie Cohen.

For anyone joining, attend every session, listen closely, and ask questions—they’re incredibly valuable. Building on Workers has given us a real advantage, and the team’s pace of innovation only compounds it.”

-Giacomo Di Pinto, Co-Founder & CEO of Sherpo.io

Tightknit AI (Cohort #4) Embedded community engagement platform built for SaaS

"Beyond the cloud credits that Launchpad provided us to play with every Cloudflare product, the most important aspect of the program we found was our ability to access (and even contribute) to the product roadmap. We were able to connect with product managers and solutions architects that have helped us take our work to the next level.

We've recently passed half a million users on the platform and have started to close not just the top Saas businesses in the world, but the top AI companies in the world, including Clay, Gamma, Lindy, beehiiv, Amplitude, Mixpanel, and so many more. The best part is that 100% of application logic is still powered by Cloudflare!

The biggest piece of advice for anyone starting the cohort is attend office hours as much as you can. I can't tell you how many times we were able to unblock ourselves or even provide real product feedback/bug reports. It was amazing to meet the rest of the cohort and solve problems together that ordinary Cloudflare developers just do not face. So my advice is don't miss the office hours. They were by far the most valuable part of our experience."

-Zach Hawtof, Co-Founder & CEO of Tightknit.ai

Render Better (Cohort #4) Increase e-commerce revenue by automatically optimizing your site speed

"My favorite part of the Launchpad was the community and the leaders who brought us together. The startup and product teams provided expert advice on both business and technical questions through meetings, 1-on-1s, and Discord. Many of them were former founders, so they understood what we were going through and helped us get what we needed. They were crucial in helping us get unstuck, whether we were using obscure Cloudflare features or needed connections to the right people.

I met a lot of great founders who are on the same journey and face the same struggles. Watching them grow was motivating and gave us a morale boost to keep up the fast pace a startup needs.

Since Launchpad, Render Better has scaled to 60 automated site speed optimizations, helping e-commerce sites convert 20% higher powered by Cloudflare Workers. Our growth accelerated after the program, and we're now optimizing traffic for some of the biggest e-commerce brands like PSD, Polywood, and Self-Portrait. Render Better now processes 5 billion requests each month, made possible by Cloudflare's global edge network and Workers platform.

Launchpad is truly just that: Cloudflare gives you the resources and attention to help you grow from an idea into something big. Build fast and take as much advantage of the fuel they give you to fly your startup rocket!"

-James Koshigoe, Founder & CEO of Render Better

Launchpad is growing into more than just a program. It is a community of builders and innovators showing what is possible with Cloudflare’s network behind them. With that foundation, we are excited to introduce the next group of entrepreneurs taking the stage in Cohort #6.

Introducing Cohort #6

Before introducing Cohort #6, we want to give one last shout out to Cohort #5. As Launchpad alumni, we cannot wait to see what you achieve. If you didn’t get a chance to check out Cohort #5’s demo day, watch the recording here.

With that, help us give a warm welcome to the participants of Workers Launchpad Cohort #6:

We’re excited to see what Cohort #6 accomplishes. Follow @CloudflareDev on X and join our Developer Discord to stay updated on their progress. If you’re a startup interested in joining Workers Launchpad, applications for Cohort #7 are now open.

Cloudflare recently announced AI agents, allowing developers to leverage Cloudflare to deploy agents to complete autonomous tasks. We’re already seeing some great examples of startups leveraging Cloudflare as their platform of choice to invest in building their agent infrastructure. Read on to see how a few up-and-coming startups are building their AI agent platforms, powered by Cloudflare.

Founded in 2023, Lamatic.ai empowers SaaS startups to seamlessly integrate intelligent AI agents into their products. Lamatic.ai simplifies the deployment of AI agents by offering a fully managed lifecycle with scalability and security in mind. SaaS providers have been leveraging Lamatic to replatform their AI workflows via a no-code visual builder to reduce technical debt and ship products faster. Designed for high availability, scalability, and low latency, Lamatic’s architecture enables developers to build AI-driven applications that remain performant under heavy load. After acquiring a high amount of users in a short amount of time on Product Hunt, Lamatic identified there was real interest to solve complex problems with AI Agents, and the team knew they needed to build a solution with scalability and performance in mind.

Cloudflare plays a key role in supporting Lamatic’s growth. Powered by Cloudflare Workers, Lamatic ensures requests process closer to end users, minimizing latency while offloading computational strain from centralized servers. In just a few months, Lamatic.ai has efficiently scaled to over three million serverless requests per month, supporting over 1,000 customers — all managed by a lean three-person team. 

Customers design their Agent Flows through a no-code visual builder, which generates an interoperable YAML configuration. Sensitive credentials such as API keys and model access tokens are securely encrypted and stored in Workers KV, ensuring they are only decrypted at runtime for enhanced security. All YAML configurations are then compiled into a Workers-compatible JavaScript bundle. When a project is deployed, Lamatic orchestrates critical components like sync jobs for scheduled data ETL operations and incoming webhooks to handle event-driven workflows via Cloudflare Queues. Once deployed, the project is fully operational as a Cloudflare Worker with an exposed API endpoint, allowing customers to integrate AI-powered automation directly into their applications with minimal friction.

To scale out their platform, Lamatic.ai built their architecture isolating serverless and AI logic on a per-customer basis. Rather than batching requests into a centralized cluster, Lamatic.ai distributes workloads across Cloudflare’s global network, ensuring each customer and endpoint is served by its own Worker executing dedicated logic. This per-customer deployment model — enabled by Workers for Platforms — allows Lamatic.ai to deliver customer-specific serverless functions at scale, and reduces technical overhead as they onboard additional customers. Each customer gets a dedicated Worker whose request and rate limits are enabled based on their level of subscription. 

Beyond request processing, Lamatic uses Cloudflare Workers KV as a distributed config store to ensure high availability and security. All values are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and decrypted only at runtime, keeping operations both secure and low-latency. Tokens and user credentials are encrypted and stored in the database and KV. 

To further enhance performance, Cloudflare Queues plays a key role in orchestrating task completion. Lamatic uses Queues to offload work from Workers requests, and handle tasks such as webhooks and coordinating distributed processes, both essential for maintaining system consistency and reliability at scale. While Workers handle sync requests at point of execution, longer running jobs process via Queues. For example, during a scheduled ETL sync, new data records generated are stored as a message queue on Cloudflare Pub/Sub. A consumer Worker collects these messages and makes an API request to the pod using the Workers Queue. The consumer Worker consumes more messages as each queue is finished processing.

Another example of where this has been optimal is for managing AI workflows. Many AI workflows involve concurrent requests to multiple data sources, Queues streamlines data processing and efficiently feeds information into customers’ Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows. This approach smooths out workload spikes, reduces bottlenecks, and ensures that AI agents can reliably aggregate and process data without delays.

Beyond this, Lamatic.ai offers Workers AI as one of the support inference providers that customers can use across their platform. Customers can choose to run one of the many open source models hosted on Workers AI, depending on their use case (chatbot, image generation, voice, etc.). Together, these layers solve the challenges of scaling AI agents by handling high volumes of data, maintaining low-latency responses, and ensuring robust security. With Cloudflare’s infrastructure as its backbone, Lamatic.ai has built a resilient and high-performing platform that meets the rigorous demands of modern AI applications, making it an ideal choice for startups embedding AI-driven features into their products.

Skyward AI is transforming compliance operations by leveraging Cloudflare’s serverless computing capabilities to build AI-driven compliance agents that streamline critical tasks like evidence collection, real-time risk analysis, and policy updates. Compliance teams in fintech, supply chain, and other highly regulated industries use these AI Agents to extract and organize evidence, provide real-time recommendations, and orchestrate policy and procedural updates automatically. By handling document parsing, risk monitoring, and policy enforcement, these AI Agents reduce the risk of human error while allowing compliance professionals to focus on high-value tasks.

Skyward has built an AI agents platform designed with a serverless-first approach, avoiding the constraints of centralized cloud computing. To achieve this, the company leverages Cloudflare’s Developer Platform to create and maintain a highly responsive and scalable infrastructure. Workers handle incoming requests like chat inputs, compliance checks, or authentication, and route them efficiently across multiple geographies. Skyward initially built their AI agents infrastructure using Durable Objects, Workflows and JavaScript-native RPC for AI coordination, but has recently transitioned to Cloudflare’s new AI agents framework. Given that agents provides a framework for building and orchestrating AI agents, the migration has helped Skyward abstract the need to manage Durable Objects manually, significantly reducing time spent on managing these tools. While this release is fairly recent, the transition has helped simplify the way that agents communicate, but it also preserved the benefits of their original design like data privacy, isolation, and concurrency management. This has also made it easier to provide real-time feedback and responses to their end users.

Skyward optimizes real-time compliance automation by achieving sub-100 ms response times for AI agent queries. Workloads are structured to minimize unnecessary network round-trips, and a sync-engine approach proactively preloads and pushes data to clients, delivering a highly responsive user experience. To proxy AI inference, Skyward uses AI Gateway to provide observability into usage, performance, and costs across multiple vendors, improving their AI operational efficiency. Leveraging Cloudflare’s serverless Developer Platform has allowed Skyward to simplify their architecture while supporting global availability, avoiding the need for Kubernetes clusters or complex locking mechanisms. The team also avoids the burden of managing regional deployments, as Cloudflare’s multi-region support ensures consistent performance worldwide without added operational complexity.

State management is a critical component to execute agentic workflows. Each compliance session runs within a dedicated Durable Object, which keeps relevant data close to the execution layer. This setup minimizes database round-trips and ensures that tasks like Anti-Money Laundering (AML) checks, Know Your Business (KYB) validation, and document processing remain efficient. Once a compliance session is complete, the system summarizes and stores the relevant information in Postgres and R2, optimizing memory usage without requiring persistent cloud infrastructure.

To balance low-latency operations with long-term storage, Skyward employs a multi-layered data management strategy. The Skyward team, using Hyperdrive, has been able to reduce query latency by nearly 50%, allowing compliance teams to receive immediate feedback. At the company's core, Skyward’s goal is to offer a platform that is "streamlined for compliance teams”. The team maintains that a speedy feedback loop ensures end customers get the data and responses needed to act. Whether there's one agent or hundreds of agents processing tasks in parallel, Hyperdrive ensures that database requests to assets like extensive company documentation (i.e. regulations, policies, procedures, internal documents), complex regulatory knowledge graphs, and on-demand context information for conversational workflows are all as performant as possible.

Durable Objects facilitate real-time session state, ensuring AI agents function smoothly without complex locking mechanisms. For larger compliance-related documents, such as legal PDFs and archived data, Cloudflare R2 provides long-term storage, ensuring only frequently accessed information remains readily available. This approach enhances performance while keeping storage management efficient and cost-effective.

Security and scalability remain priorities for compliance-focused AI applications. Skyward enforces strict access controls, ensuring that only authorized users can access development and production environments. Each AI session maintains an auditable log of key events, user actions, and approvals, supporting the ability to export these insights for compliance and legal requirements. Because each agent is deployed in its own instance and has its own database, Skyward ensures that there is a detailed record of every required user, agent interaction, and auditing requirements. On top of this, the ability to deploy and scale globally with Cloudflare’s network has allowed Skyward to maintain consistent, high-performance operations across multiple regions without extensive infrastructure overhead.

Looking ahead, Skyward plans to further enhance AI agent responsiveness by running select models directly on Cloudflare Workers AI, reducing reliance on external inference providers. The team plans to further integrate Workers for Platforms in an effort to better isolate customer data and workflows, giving end users greater control over their compliance automation. As Cloudflare continues to evolve its AI capabilities, Skyward aims to push the boundaries of distributed AI compliance solutions, making regulatory adherence more automated, scalable, and secure.

We’re inspired by how startups like Lamatic AI and Skyward AI are building their AI agent platforms on Cloudflare. This kind of innovation is why we’re proud to see so many startups trust Cloudflare for a scalable, reliable, and efficient foundation. 

We’re also thrilled to share that both Lamatic AI and Skyward AI have been invited to join Cloudflare’s upcoming Workers Launchpad Cohort #5. Speaking of Workers Launchpad, it’s been a few months since our last update — let’s take a look at what’s new.

The Workers Launchpad team is blown away by what customers are demonstrating on the Developer Platform. Members of Cohort #4 presented at our bi-annual Demo Day. We had customers demonstrate what they’re building across a multitude of industries, including (of course) AI / ML, developer tools, 3D design, cloud infrastructure, adtech, media, and beyond. It’s incredibly encouraging to see what all these amazing companies are building on the Cloudflare network, and we look forward to continuing to partner with them throughout their startup journey.

Following the Demo Day for Workers Launchpad Cohort #4, we’ve seen the largest influx of applications from startups across the globe eager to join Cohort #5. This next wave of founders is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, building in areas like AI agents, developer tooling, MCP, media, and beyond. With each new cohort, we’re continually inspired by the caliber of founding teams, the bold ideas they bring to life, and the real-world problems they’re tackling with technology.

Help us give some love and a warm welcome to the participants of Cohort #5:

We can’t wait to share more about what Cohort #5 achieves. Be sure to follow @CloudflareDev on X and join our Developer Discord server to hear updates on the cohorts.

If you’re developing your application on our Developer Platform, we’d love to learn how Cloudflare is powering your journey. Please share more about what you’re building, and our team will be sure to review your submission. And if you’re a startup and interested in joining Workers Launchpad, feel free to apply for Cohort 6 — applications are now open!

Months before Birthday Week, we invited teams to submit ideas for what to announce. We were flooded with submissions, from proposals for implementing new standards to creating new products for developers. Our biggest challenge is finding space for it all in just one week — there is still so much to build. Good thing we have a birthday to celebrate each year, but we might need an extra day in Birthday Week next year!

In case you missed it, here’s everything we announced during 2024’s Birthday Week:

Cloudflare serves millions of customers and their millions of domains across nearly every country on Earth. However, as a global company, the payment landscape can be complex — especially in regions outside of North America. While credit cards are very popular for online purchases in the US, the global picture is quite different. 60% of consumers across EMEA, APAC and LATAM choose alternative payment methods. For instance, European consumers often opt for SEPA Direct Debit, a bank transfer mechanism, while Chinese consumers frequently use Alipay, a digital wallet.

At Cloudflare, we saw this as an opportunity to meet customers where they are. Today, we're thrilled to announce that we are expanding our payment system and launching a closed beta for a new payment method called Stripe Link. The checkout experience will be faster and more seamless, allowing our self-serve customers to pay using saved bank accounts or cards with Link. Customers who have saved their payment details at any business using Link can quickly check out without having to reenter their payment information.

These are the first steps in our efforts to expand our payment system to support global payment methods used by customers around the world. We'll be rolling out new payment methods gradually, ensuring a smooth integration and gathering feedback from our customers every step of the way.

That’s all for Birthday Week 2024. However, the innovation never stops at Cloudflare. Continue to follow the Cloudflare Blog all year long as we launch more products and features that help build a better Internet.

Creating from the ground up often means spending countless hours piecing together the right development stack, navigating different pricing models, and managing growing costs — all of which can take your focus away from what truly matters: building your product and growing your business.

Hey! Dani Grant here, one of the first PMs at Cloudflare and co-founder of Jam.dev. Ten years ago (during 2014’s Birthday Week), Cloudflare launched Universal SSL, making SSL free on the Internet for the first time, and in one night doubling the size of the encrypted web.

I was a college student back then, and I immediately became enraptured by Cloudflare’s mission: helping build a better Internet. As part of this mission, Cloudflare has developed powerful tools typically accessible only to Internet giants, oftentimes offering them for free to developers and individuals alike. Heck yeah! I joined Cloudflare in January 2015, and 5 years after that, co-founded a developer tool company called Jam, inspired by the impact that I saw building tools for developers could have while at Cloudflare.

It’s now 10 years later, and a lot has changed –– “software ate the world” and it’s now powering all aspects of our lives, from health to finances to how we work. It’s more important than ever to empower every developer with the best tools available, because the faster we build software, the sooner people’s experiences improve.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the Dev Starter Pack, an alliance of like-minded dev tool companies giving away their services for free, or heavily discounting them for developers who want to start companies and build the future.

Not only does this stack include all the tools you need to build a startup, it also includes all the tools you need to build AI-powered features. We believe that the next wave of startups will be AI-native, as AI becomes as ubiquitous as the electricity that powers the servers.

We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible with AI, and we hope this launch gets developers closer to solving the challenges of building non-deterministic software.

If you’re a software engineer, and you want to build a project or a company and need an off the shelf stack of dev tools to get started, go to devstarterpack.io to start using all of these tools.

Each provider is offering developers a heavily discounted or even free plan to get started building. You can redeem these services by either using the special code “devstarterpack” or selecting “Dev Starter Pack” while applying to relevant programs.

We welcome more tools to join the alliance — this is just the beginning. If you are building a developer tool and would like to include your product in the Dev Starter Pack, let us know here, so we can include you. 

We are very excited to see what you will build. Please share with us in Cloudflare’s Discord and community forum, so we can support you however it makes sense.

Software developers are changing the world, and we believe in providing support to help you make an even greater impact. If you’re looking for additional funding or support, check out Cloudflare’s Launchpad for developers turned founders building startups.

Melissa and Chris from the Cloudflare for Startups team here. Our team is blown away by what customers are demonstrating on the Developer Platform. Just a few weeks ago, our Workers Launchpad Cohort #3 wrapped up. On Demo Day, customers demoed their applications built on Cloudflare, spanning AI, dev tools, IaaS, observability, SaaS, media, and beyond. We’re incredibly proud of Cohort #3 participants, and we look forward to their continued success with Cloudflare.

Following Demo Day of Workers Launchpad Cohort #3, we’ve been excited to receive a surge of new applications from startups around the world. These startups are pushing the boundaries of innovation, particularly in areas like observability, PaaS, AI, automation, e-commerce, and other industries. Many startups that applied this go-around demonstrated that they’ve built some great applications on Cloudflare, and today, we’re excited to announce the accepted participants for our upcoming Workers Launchpad Cohort #4.

Let’s take a look at what Cohort #4 participants are building in their own words:

The Cloudflare team is ecstatic to work with the amazing participants of Cohort #4. If you want to follow along on Cohort #4’s journey, be sure to follow @CloudflareDev on X and join our Developer Discord server.

Are you a startup building on Cloudflare? Apply for Cohort #5!

What AI applications can you build with Cloudflare? Instead of us telling you we reached out to a small handful of the numerous AI companies using Cloudflare to learn a bit about what they’re building and how Cloudflare is helping them on their journey.

We heard common themes from these companies about the challenges they face in bringing new products to market in the ever-changing world of AI ranging from training and deploying models, the ethical and moral judgements of AI, gaining the trust of users, and the regulatory landscape.  One area that is not a challenge is trusting their AI application infrastructure to Cloudflare.

Azule, based in Calgary, Canada, was founded to apply the power of AI to streamline and improve ecommerce customer service. It’s an exciting moment that, for the first time ever, we can now dynamically generate, deploy, and test code to meet specific user needs or integrations. This kind of flexibility is crucial to create a tool like Azule that is designed to meet this demand, offering a platform that can handle complex requirements and provide flexible integration options with other tools.

The AI space is evolving quickly and that applies to the rapid evolution of AI agent design patterns. These are essentially frameworks built upon LLM APIs, and they're showing immense potential. Azule effectively allows users to create AI agents which interact with their customers on behalf of their business. It's not just about addressing customer service queries anymore – AI agents can perform significant, ongoing tasks across various industries.

Azule is built entirely on Cloudflare, except for API calls to OpenAI.

The application relies on multiple Developer Platform and Cloudflare products and services.  Durable Objects and websockets are used for live chat.

“Durable Objects enabled us to build our MVP faster than we could have on any other platform, thanks to Cloudflare's thoughtful product design.” - Logan Grasby

Other products used by Azule:

• Queues for data processing.

• R2 for all data storage, including vector storage. Instead of using a vector database service, Azule relies entirely on Cloudflare's R2 and cache API for on-disk vector search.

• Workers KV for storing frequently accessed configuration data.

• D1 was implemented for their user database.

• Constellation (now Workers AI) for various labeling and summarization tasks.

• Workers for Platforms allows Azule AI to write and deploy custom features for the users.

• Pages for hosting our landing page and marketing content.

Other valuable features used include API shield, email workers, the mail channels integration for email, log push, outbound workers, among others!

“I firmly believe that AI agents are at home on the web. Everything Cloudflare builds has web optimization in mind and so it only makes sense to invest in the platform. By building on Cloudflare, we've made significant cost reductions, particularly by moving all our search solutions to R2. For example, many of our users want to store large datasets on Azule and make them searchable through their agents. Our previous search solutions, based on Pinecone and Milisearch, would have cost thousands of dollars per month to store and search through just one customer's data. With Cloudflare's R2 and cache API, we can now enable our customer's AI agent to comb through large datasets in less than 900ms, at a fraction of the cost.” - Logan Grasby

42able, headquartered in Wales, UK, is at the forefront of AI-driven solutions, dedicated to revolutionizing engagement with business documents. Through cutting-edge technology and innovative strategies, the company seeks to streamline, enhance, and redefine the way businesses interact with their documents.

The modern business landscape is inundated with vast volumes of documents, from contracts and reports to invoices and internal communications. Navigating, understanding, and extracting value from these documents can be time-consuming, error-prone, and often requires significant manual effort.

42able envisions a future where business documents are not just static pieces of information but dynamic assets that businesses can engage with interactively, efficiently, and intelligently.

“Launching an AI product has come with many unique challenges and uncertainties. Users expect AI to be perfect or near-perfect, and are much less forgiving of an AI making an error compared to a human making the same mistake. Decisions about how AI systems should act often involve moral or ethical judgments, which might not be straightforward and can be subject to societal debates. Training and deploying AI models is challenging. Cloudflare's solutions are making it much easier, than managing all the individual parts ourselves.” - James Finney

42able chose Cloudflare for fantastic performance in comparison to other cloud providers, in part due to the no cold boot times, competitive pricing, ease of use, fantastic local development features, and brilliant support. Their development times have decreased through the use of:

• Workers for all the APIs and re-occurring cron scripts.

• Pages for all application/platform front-end hosting

• KV for Angular apps.

• R2 to store cached personal user data R2.

• General DNS zone management

• DDOS protection

• DNS management

• Turnstile

• Zero Trust to secure login pages

They are starting to test with Constellation (now Workers AI) to host some of their models and D1 to support their database needs.

Layercode allows developers to build low-latency voice AI agents for web, mobile or phone. Their platform powers the real-time infrastructure required for companies to deliver responsive, engaging voice AI applications at global scale.

Cloudflare Workers power the core of their voice AI pipelines, ensuring that users experience zero cold starts and reliable performance when processing voice data. In addition, Cloudflare’s Durable Objects and DO SQL provide the consistent execution and storage environment needed for their hosted voice AI agents and various internal features.

WebRTC is essential for delivering smooth voice AI experiences on both web and mobile platforms. With Cloudflare Realtime’s extensive WebRTC product suite, Layercode can offer WebRTC support at scale, eliminating the typical complexities of hosting and scaling.

“Latency is everything when it comes to natural conversation with voice AI. Layercode chose Cloudflare because it’s the best platform for delivering low-latency voice AI experiences globally.” - Damien Tanner

Eclipse’s mission is to revolutionise the way businesses approach customer feedback. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Eclipse empowers users to make data-driven decisions by leveraging AI for comprehensive customer understanding. If your goals are to; reduce churn, drive growth or improve your customer experience, Eclipse puts the data at your fingertips and provides you actionable insights to drive your business.

Eclipse allows you to unify your Voice of Customer channels (i.e. phone, video calls, emails, support tickets, public reviews and surveys), the platform analyses it at scale and utilises Generative AI to provide key actions specific to your business. Focused on democratising data driven decision-making, Eclipse AI has launched a Freemium model, leveling the playing field for businesses of all sizes to utilise this tech.

“We believe the future of the internet is on the edge and Cloudflare is at the forefront of this revolution with a growing network that covers most major cities around the world. As a startup with limited resources, the Cloudflare developer platform has enabled our dev team to focus on building our product and not be burdened with managing infrastructure. Best of all, it scales automagically with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.” - Saad Irfani

Eclipse AI uses:

• Cloudflare Workers for the backend API.

• Cloudflare Pages for the frontend to deliver content across hundreds of cities worldwide.

• Cloudflare Images to serve cascaded versions of each asset

• Cloudflare R2 as the object store.

“As a platform that transcribes video/audio call recordings for VoC analytics, choosing a reliable object-store was an important decision. After the launch of R2 we switched from S3 and noticed a staggering 70% reduction in cost. Overall, we are believers in Cloudflare’s vision and are eagerly awaiting the release of D1 so that our entire stack can be powered by the edge.” - Saad Irfani

Embley, based in Sierre, Switzerland, is a Marketplace Automation Platform that powers the future of marketplace commerce by enabling businesses to scale better and faster.

The platform combines the most advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Process Mining to strengthen a fast end-to-end business process automation with products tailored to marketplaces businesses.

Cloudflare powers Embley’s frontend through Cloudflare Pages that serves what they call the “control center” to the users at the edge. The control center is the core of the back-office tools that users use to manage their marketplace operations.  The backend is powered by Workers, providing a serverless execution environment, connected to the frontend through the Cloudflare API Gateway.

“The primary reasons for choosing Cloudflare are the powerful serverless products that enable us to run an entire tech stack without having to care about infrastructure. Also, the scalability of Cloudflare’s global network is appealing. Finally, security is embedded into Cloudflare through the Zero Trust platform that enable us to secure both production but also the lower environments including the secured access to internal systems and apps.” - Laurent Christen

ChainFuse, based in San Francisco, CA, is a multichannel AI platform that assists organizations in collecting and analyzing user feedback on a large scale. Their AI-powered community tool aids support, community, and product teams in garnering valuable insights, facilitating more informed product decisions.

“We have used Google Cloud and AWS, but our experience with Cloudflare has particularly stood out. Since 2016, we have consistently chosen Cloudflare for our projects due to their excellent product range and reliable performance. Saying "it just works" is an understatement.” - Victor Sanchez

ChainFuse relies on Workers for the core of their backend infrastructure and a range of our security solutions to secure their applications and employees. WAF and its vast adaptability is a major defense, blocking an average of 48% of all incoming traffic, effectively weeding out known malicious traffic. Additionally, it employs rate limiting to prevent abuse. API Shield, used in conjunction with WAF, intercepts an average of 1.32% of the incoming traffic that manages to bypass WAF. The Zero Trust Gateway not only secures their employees but also is integrated into their product to prevent end users from exploiting the platform for malicious purposes.

ai.moda, headquartered in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, is building multiple AI tools with a focus on helping bridge humans, developers, and machines together. They’re currently building several ChatGPT plugins (such as CVEs and S3 storage), YourCrowd (MTurk compatible API for humans and bots), and Valkyrie (an automated zero-trust hardening for Linux applications and cloud workloads).

Plugins like CVEs by ai.moda bring real-time vulnerability information into ChatGPT.

“By using Workers, we’re able to create SaaS services at a scale and cost that just wouldn’t be possible without. If you want a new ChatGPT plugin, let us know on Friday, and by Monday we can have it developed and shipped in production! The rapid development allowed by Workers is a huge advantage for us.”- David Manouchehri

They chose Cloudflare mainly because of the Workers platform. Being able to deploy new code rapidly globally with a single command has greatly simplified their DevOps needs, and they no longer need to worry about whether they have enough resources to scale up.

ai.moda is a heavy user of Cloudflare Workers, Email Workers, Pages, R2, Durable Objects, Constellation (now Workers AI), Cache API, DMARC management, Access, WAF, logpush, DNS, Health Checks, Zaraz, and D1.

We share the opinion of many of these companies that witnessing the incredible breadth and versatility of AI technology and the impact it has on organizations and people is astonishing, and we can’t wait to see where this technology takes people. If you’re inspired by reading these stories and want to start building, check out the Startup program and our Cloudflare for AI solutions.

If you want to share your story about what you’ve built, reach out to us or join the Developers Discord.

***Since launching the Launchpad program in 2022, we have showcased a number of exciting startups looking to build the next big application. Whether innovative website designs, content delivery or AI-based features, the internet is waiting for the next big thing.

With that said, we are proud to announce our revamped Built With Workers site, an opportunity to showcase your projects with the developer community. Built With Workers will serve as a public facing repository of full-stack applications running on the Developer Platform to demonstrate how Cloudflare is helping developers build amazing applications.

Whether you're using R2 object storage to store web data, utilizing Workers to manage your application functionality or designing the next big web application UI with Pages, we love seeing what our customers are building!

To showcase your latest and greatest projects featured on Built with Workers, complete and submit our quick form to share your projects or business with us. Share how you're using Cloudflare products to build the application of your dreams or help expand developer knowledge with our developer community.

We launched the $2B Workers Launchpad Funding Program in late 2022 to help support the over one million developers building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, many of which are startups leveraging Cloudflare to ship faster, scale more efficiently, and accelerate their growth.

Since announcing the program just a few months ago, we have welcomed 25 startups from all around the world into our inaugural cohort and recently wrapped up the program with the Demo Day. Cohort #1 gathered weekly for Office Hours with our Solutions Architects for technical advice and the Founders Bootcamp, where they spent time with Cloudflare leadership, preview upcoming products with our Developer Platform Product Managers, and receive advice on a wide range of topics such as how to build Sales teams and think about the right pricing model for your product.

Learn more about what these companies are building and what they’ve been up to below:

Identity and Access Management streamlined.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Cloudflare is the de facto Infrastructure for building resilient serverless products, it was a no-brainer to migrate to Cloudflare Workers to build the most frictionless experience for our customers.”

Recent updatesLearn more about how Authdog is using Cloudflare’s Developer Platform in their Built With Workers case study.

Automotive Commerce APIs to Buy & Sell Cars Online.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“We believe that Cloudflare is the next-generation of cloud computing platforms, and Drivly is completely built on Cloudflare, from Workers, Queues, PubSub, and especially Durable Objects.”

Recent updatesDrivly made their public launch at Demo Day!

Integrate APIs, the easy way.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Simplicity and Performance. Using Pages and KV is extremely easy, but what really impresses are Workers with a nearly instant cold start!”

Recent updatesCheck out how Cloudflare is helping Flethy improve and accelerate API service integrations for developers here.

Serverless GPU.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Cloudflare is core to the internet; R2, Transit, Workers with no egress charge.”

Recent updatesGPUX launched v2 of their platform on Demo Day!

The easiest way to build and deploy GraphQL backends.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“The Grafbase platform is built from the ground up to be highly performant and deployed to the edge using Rust and WebAssembly. Services like Cloudflare Workers, KV, Durable Objects, Edge Caching were a natural choice as it fits perfectly into our vision architecturally.”

Recent updatesGrafbase, which is building on Workers for Platforms among other Cloudflare products, celebrated their public launch and 7 new features in their April 2023 Launch Week.

Simple, seamless, and secure way to eliminate passwords.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“We found it to be the best fit for our needs: performant, and easy to develop on, easy to scale.”

Recent updatesLearn more about how JEMPass works here.

The last line of defense for the software supply chain.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Cloudflare's developer products offer effortlessly powerful building blocks essential to scaling up product to meet strenuous customer demand while enabling our developers to deliver faster than ever.”

Recent updatesKarambit recently received a grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation to help scale their commercial growth.

A no-code analytics platform for growth teams that automatically turns raw data into actionable narratives.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Our customers benefit as we improve the quality of insights for them by running advanced algorithms for finding unqualified data points and quickly solving them with the unlimited power of Cloudflare Workers.”

Recent updatesLearn more about how Cloudflare is helping Narrative BI improve the quality of insights they generate for customers here.

API-first personalization and experimentation solution to give your customers blazing-fast experiences.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Cloudflare’s developers platform allows us to fully deploy our everything-on-the-edge approach to both data and delivery means personalized experience cause zero loading lag and zero interruptions for the customer.”

Recent updatesNinetailed recently launched integrations with Contentstack, Zapier, and other tools to improve and personalize digital customer experiences. Learn more on the Ninetailed blog and their Built with Workers case study.

Scalable, secure and cost-effective digital infrastructure, without the complexities of it.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Workers provides us with a global network of edge compute that we can use to route data internally to our user's deployments, providing our users with infinite scale.”

Recent updatesPatr was recently highlighted as a Product of the Day on Product Hunt!

Polyglot monitoring and edge observability.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Polyglot, Secure, Cost-Effective Edge Observability - all powered by Cloudflare Workers and R2 Storage.”

Recent updatesQRYN recently launched integrations with Cloudflare Log Push, Grafana, and others.

Quest is a code-generation tool that automatically generates frontend code for business applications.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“We chose Cloudflare's Workers and Pages product to augment our frontend code-gen to include backend and hosting capabilities.”

Recent updatesQuest has been hard at work expanding their platform and recently added animations, CSS grid, MUI & Chakra UI support, NextJS support, breakpoints, nested components, and more.

Simple & Secure ‍User Access. Rollup is all your authentication and authorization needs bundled into one great package.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“We chose Cloudflare’s developer platform because it provides us all the tools to build a logical user graph at the edge. We can utilize everything from Durable Objects, D1, R2, and more to build a fast and distributed auth platform.”

Recent updatesRollup ID recently made their public debut and has rolled out lots of new features since. Learn more here.

Translating videos at the speed of social media using AI.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Cloudflare Stream allows us to compete with YouTube's scale while being a 1-person startup, and Cloudflare Workers handles millions of unique views on Targum without waking us up at night.”

Recent updatesTargum launched its platform to customers and passed $100K MRR in just one month! Check out their Built With Workers case study to learn more.

Fixing website platforms without code.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare“Workers and the Cloudflare developer platform have been pivotal in enabling us to modernize and enhance existing website platforms and grow their conversions by 5X with little to no code.”

Recent updatesTouchless has been growing their ecosystem and recently joined the RudderStack Solutions Partner Program.

We have received hundreds of applications from startups from nearly 50 different countries. There were many AI or AI-related companies helping everyone from developers, to security teams and sales organizations. We also heard from many startups looking to improve developer tooling and collaboration, new social and gaming platforms, and companies solving a wide range of problems that ecommerce, consumer, real estate, and other businesses face today.

While these applicants are tackling a diverse set of real-world problems, the common thread is that they chose to leverage Cloudflare’s developer platform to build more secure, scalable, and feature-rich products faster than they otherwise could.

Without further ado, we are thrilled to announce the 25 incredible startups selected for Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad:

Here’s what they’re building, in their own words:

We are looking forward to working with each of these companies over the next few months and sharing what they’re building with you.

If you’re building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, head over to @CloudflareDev or join the Cloudflare Developer Discord community to stay in the loop on Launchpad updates. In the early fall, we’ll be selecting Cohort #3 -- apply early here!

Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.

During Birthday Week 2022, we announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups building on our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. This was done in partnership with 26 leading VC firms who have been investing in or seeking to invest in Workers-based startups.

Today, we’re excited to reveal the first cohort of Launchpad Startups as well as 14 additional VC partners, bringing the Launchpad to $2 billion in potential funding from 40 VC firms in total.

We are excited to welcome 14 additional firms to the Workers Launchpad, which you can find included in the image below. They have worked with hundreds of companies that have grown to become leaders in their areas including Asana, Canva, Figma, Netlify, Vercel, Area 1 Security (which Cloudflare acquired in 2022), and many others. Notably, they also represent a diverse group of investors who support startups across North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

Many of these investors have seen the competitive advantages of building on Workers through their own portfolio companies firsthand and are looking forward to providing the capital and resources you need to build and scale your business.

We received hundreds of applications for the Fall cohort from startups representing more than 30 countries. We were blown away by the breadth of businesses that folks were building - some are creating tools to simplify developer workflows, while others are helping ecommerce businesses better reach and serve customers around the world. The common thread amongst all the Launchpad companies, however, is their usage of Cloudflare’s developer platform to build more secure, reliable, and feature-rich products faster than they otherwise could.

Our inaugural cohort of Launchpad startups features 25 diverse businesses. Here’s what they’re building, in their own words:

Nope! We will select Launchpad Startups on a quarterly basis, so if you are building on Workers, interested in pitching VCs, and want to join our next cohort of Workers Founder, apply here! If you’re new to Workers and looking to begin building, check out our Startup Plan for a year of free Cloudflare services, Built with Workers, and join our Cloudflare Developer Discord community.

Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.

From our earliest days, Cloudflare has stood for helping build a better Internet that’s accessible to all. It’s core to our mission that anyone who wants to start building on the Internet should be able to do so easily, and without the barriers of prohibitively expensive or difficult to use infrastructure.

Nowhere is this philosophy more important – and more impactful to the Internet – than with our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. Workers is, quite simply, where developers and entrepreneurs start on Day 1. It’s a full developer platform that includes cloud storage; website hosting; SQL databases; and of course, the industry’s leading serverless product. The platform’s ease-of-use and accessible pricing (all the way down to free) are critical in advancing our mission. For startups, this translates into fast, easy deployment and iteration, that scales seamlessly with predictable, transparent and cost-effective pricing. Building a great business from scratch is hard enough – we ought to know! – and so we’re aiming to take all the complexity out of your application infrastructure.

Today, we’re taking things a step further and making it easier for startups to build the business of their dreams. We’re announcing a $1.25 billion Workers Launchpad funding program in partnership with some of the world’s leading venture capital firms. Any startup built on Workers can apply. As is the case with the Workers Platform itself, we’ve tried to make applying dead simple: it should take you less than five minutes to submit your application through the Workers Launchpad portal.

How does it work? The only requirement for being eligible for the funding program is that you’ve built your core infrastructure on Workers. If you’re new to Cloudflare and Cloudflare Workers, check out our Startup Plan to get started. We hope these resources will be helpful to all startups and help level the playing field, no matter where in the world you might be.

Once you submit your application, it will be reviewed by our Launchpad team, several of whom are former entrepreneurs and venture capital folks themselves. They’ll match promising applicants with our VC partners who have the most expertise in your space (more on them below). Every quarter, we’ll announce the winners of our Launchpad program. Winners, our “Workers Founders”, will be guaranteed the opportunity to pitch the VC partner(s) that we’ve determined would be a good match for your business. It’s a win-win all around. VCs get the opportunity to invest in businesses they know are being built on a forward-looking, world-class, development platform. Entrepreneurs get connected to world-class VCs. And for the first class of winners, we’ll have a few added perks that we describe in more detail below.

When we approached our friends in the venture community with our vision for the Workers Launchpad, we received incredibly positive feedback and excitement. Many have seen firsthand the competitive advantages of building on Workers through their own portfolio companies. Moreover, Cloudflare is home to one of the largest developer communities on Earth with approximately 20% of the world’s websites on our network. As such, we can play a unique role in matching great entrepreneurs with great VCs to further not only the Workers platform, but also the Internet ecosystem, for everyone.

We’re honored to announce a world-class group of VC Launch Partners supporting this program and the ecosystem of Workers-based startups:

So why are we doing this? The simple answer is we’re proud of our Workers Developer Platform and think that everyone should be using it. Entrepreneurs who develop on Workers can ship faster; more easily and cost-effectively; and in a way that future proofs your infrastructure:

Speed. Development velocity isn’t just a convenience for an entrepreneur. It’s a massive competitive advantage. In fact, development velocity is one of Cloudflare’s competitive advantages – we’re able to develop quickly because we build on Workers. When you develop on Workers, you don’t need to spend time configuring DNS records, maintaining certificates, scaling up clusters, or building complex deployment pipelines. Focus on developing your application, and Cloudflare will handle the rest.

Ease of use. Startup teams and founders are some of the busiest people on earth. You shouldn’t have to think about – or make complicated decisions about – IT infrastructure. Questions like: “Which availability zone should I choose?”, or “Will I be able to scale up my infrastructure in time for our next viral marketing campaign?” shouldn’t have to cross your mind! And on the Workers Platform, they don’t. The code you and your team writes automatically deploys quickly and consistently across Cloudflare’s global network in 275+ cities in over 100 countries. Cloudflare securely and scalably connects your users to your applications, regardless of where those applications are hosted or how many users suddenly sign up for your product. Developers can easily manage globally distributed applications with a programmable network that easily connects to whatever services they need to talk to.

Future-proofing your infrastructure and your wallet. Cloudflare’s massive global network – that’s distributed across 275+ cities in over 100 countries – is able to scale with your business, no matter how large it grows to become. We also help you remain compliant with local laws and regulations as you expand around the world, with capabilities like Workers’ Jurisdictional Restrictions for Durable Objects. You can sleep soundly at night instead of worrying about how to level up your infrastructure in the midst of shifting regulations, and equally importantly, knowing that you will not wake up to any surprise bills. Many of us have had the experience of being charged unexpected and / or exorbitant fees from our cloud providers. For example, providers will often make it easy and free to onboard your application or data, but charge exorbitant rates when you want to move them out (i.e. egress fees). Cloudflare will never charge for egress. Our pricing is simple, and we constantly aim to be the low-cost provider, no matter how large your business grows to be.

We’re excited about Workers not only because we’ve built our own infrastructure on it, but also because we’re seeing the incredible things others have built on it. In fact, we acquired a company built entirely on Workers at the end of last year, an Israeli start-up named Zaraz, which secures and accelerates third party web tools. Workers allowed Zaraz to replace the multiple network requests of each tool running on a website with one single request, effectively streamlining a messy web of extensions into a single lightweight application. This acquisition opened our eyes to the power of the global community that’s built on our platform, and left us motivated to help startups built on Workers find the funding, mentorship, and support needed to grow.

To make it even easier for startups to take advantage of all the benefits that Workers has to offer, applicants to the Workers Launchpad program who have raised less than $3 million in total external funding will automatically have the option to receive Cloudflare’s Startup Plan. This plan includes all the elements of Cloudflare’s Pro and Business Plans ($2,400 annual value) plus higher tiers of our Stream video product, our Teams Zero Trust security suite and the Workers platform. To make sure the full range of our developer platform is accessible to startups, we recently more than tripled the number of products available in this plan, which now includes email security, R2, Pages, KV, and many others.

Furthermore, all startups that apply by October 31, 2022, will be eligible to be selected for the Winter 2022 class of Workers Founders, which will unlock additional support, mentorship, and marketing opportunities. Being selected as a Workers Founder will get you a chance to practice your pitch with investors, engage with leaders from Cloudflare, and get advice on how to build a successful business from topics like recruiting to marketing, sales, and beyond during a virtual Workers Founders Bootcamp Week. The program will culminate in a virtual Demo Day, so you can show the world what you’ve been building. We’re leaning in to help promising entrepreneurs join us in our mission to help build a better Internet.

Accessibility and ease of use are core to everything we do at Cloudflare. We will always make our products and platforms so easy to use that even the smallest business or hobbyist can easily use them. We hope the Workers Launchpad funding program encourages entrepreneurs from all around the world, and from all backgrounds, to start building on Workers, and makes it easier for you to find the funding you need to build the business of your dreams.

Head to the Workers Launchpad page to apply and join the Cloudflare Developer Discord to engage with the Workers community. If you’re a VC that is interested in supporting the program, reach out to Workers-Launchpad@cloudflare.com.

Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.

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.