During Developer Week a few months ago, we opened up the Beta for Cloudflare for SaaS: a one-stop shop for SaaS providers looking to provide fast load times, unparalleled redundancy, and the strongest security to their customers.
Since then, we’ve seen numerous developers integrate with our technology, allowing them to spend their time building out their solution instead of focusing on the burdens of running a fast, secure, and scalable infrastructure — after all, that’s what we’re here for.
Today, we are very excited to announce that Cloudflare for SaaS is generally available, so that every customer, big and small, can use Cloudflare for SaaS to continue scaling and building their SaaS business.
What is Cloudflare for SaaS?
If you’re running a SaaS company, you have customers that are fully reliant on you for your service. That means you’re responsible for keeping their domain fast, secure, and protected. But this isn’t simple. There’s a long checklist you need to get through to put a solution in your customers’ hands:
Set up an origin server
Encrypt your customers’ traffic
Keep your customers online
Boost the performance of global customers
Support vanity domains
Protect against attacks and bots
Scale for growth
Provide insights and analytics
And on top of that, you need to also focus on building out your solution and your business. As a developer or startup with limited resources, this can delay your product launch by weeks or months.
That’s what we’re here to help with! We have numerous engineering teams whose sole focus is to work on products that take care of each one of these tasks, so you don’t have to!
The Cloudflare solution:
Set up an origin server → Workers
Encrypt your customers’ traffic → SSL for SaaS
Keep your customers online → Cloudflare’s global Anycast network
Boost the performance of global customers → Argo Smart Routing/Cache
Support vanity domains → Custom Hostnames
Protect against attacks and bots → WAF and Bot Management
Scale for growth → Workers
Provide insights and analytics → Custom Hostname Analytics
Pricing, Made for Developers
Starting today, Cloudflare for SaaS is available to purchase on Free, Pro, and Business plans. We wanted to make sure that the pricing made sense for developers. At the time of building, you don’t know how many customers you’ll have, so we wanted to offer flexibility by keeping the pricing as simple as possible: only pay for the customers you use.
Each customer domain using the service is called a Custom Hostname. For each Custom Hostname, we automatically provision a TLS certificate. But not just that! Beyond the TLS certificate, each of your Custom Hostnames inherits the full suite of Cloudflare products that you set up on your SaaS zone. From Bot Management to Argo Smart Routing, you can extend these add-ons that protect and accelerate your domain to your customers.
Custom Hostnames cost two dollars per month. We will only charge you after each Custom Hostname has been onboarded, adjusted according to when you created it. That means that if you created 10 Custom Hostnames at the start of the month and 10 Custom Hostnames halfway through, at the end of the month you will be billed $30.
This way, you’re only charged for the Custom Hostnames that you provision. It’s also a great incentive to make sure you clean up after your churned customers.
If you’re an Enterprise customer and want to learn more about the benefits that you can get from Cloudflare for SaaS, make sure you check out our blog post about the latest developments.
Show us what you’re building!
During the beta alone, we’ve seen incredible projects built out on the platform. We wanted to showcase these developers to show you what’s possible. And even better, some of these have been built on our Workers platform! We’d love to see what you’re working on. Join our Discord channel and showcase your work! Have feature requests for us? Let us know!
mmm.page: Simple Personal Websites
mmm.page is a drag-and-drop website builder that makes it dead simple to create auto-responsive, collage-like websites: websites with overlapping text, images, GIFs, YouTube videos, Spotify embeds, and (a lot) more. To make it easier, all the standard website tedium — uptime, usability, performance, reliability, responsiveness, SEO, etc. — are handled under the hood so all you have to worry about is adding content and arranging it how you want.
Under their hood is Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s CDN allows both the flexibility of server-side pages as well as the instant loading times of static pages — not to mention an 80% reduction in server costs. Custom Hostnames alone saved months of development time by handling domain names and SSL management (which are otherwise tricky to get perfect and reliable).
They’ve used Workers for increasingly more tasks that would’ve otherwise taken an order of magnitude more time if implemented with their current backend monolith — the ease of deployment and comparatively low cost of Workers is something that keeps them coming back.
The longer-term hope is for pages to be used as a sort of beacon signal, an easy-to-make yet unbounded way to express to others the things you’re interested in, especially for things that aren’t so easily describable or captured in words. They look forward to a world of a ton more DIY micro-sites. Cloudflare has been crucial in taking care of much of the difficult technical plumbing and giving them more time to work on designs and features that get them closer to this hope.
Lightfunnels
Lightfunnels is a performance driven e-commerce and lead generation platform. It focuses on delivering fast, reliable, and highly converting sales funnels to its users and their customers.
With Cloudflare for SaaS, Lightfunnels allows users to preserve their brand by easily connecting their own domain names with SSL to use on their funnels.
The platform handles large e-commerce traffic volume through Cloudflare Workers. This helps Lightfunnels serve pages from the closest edge to the customer, wherever they are in the world, allowing for blazing fast page load speeds.
Workers also come with a powerful caching API that eliminates a great percentage of back-end trips and reduces the stress on their servers.
“Our aim is to build the best performing e-commerce and lead generation platform on the market. Page load speeds play a significant role in performance. Using Cloudflare for SaaS along with Cloudflare Workers made building a reliable, secure, and fast infrastructure a breeze.”- Yassir Ennazk, Co-founder & CEO at Lightfunnels
Ventrata
Ventrata is a SaaS multi-channel booking platform for large attractions and tour operators. They power booking sites and B2B booking portals for clients that run on other domains. Cloudflare for SaaS has allowed them to leverage all of Cloudflare’s tools, including Firewall, image caching, Workers, and free TLS certificates on Custom Hostnames, while allowing their clients to keep full control of their brand. Their implementation involved just 4 lines of code without any infrastructure/DevOps help required, which would have been impossible before.
Currently a part of the Beta?
If you were accepted as a part of the Cloudflare for SaaS Beta, you will get a notice next week about migrating to the paid version.
Help build a better Internet
Want to be a part of the Cloudflare team and work on the products that power Cloudflare for SaaS? We’re hiring!