A raft of free Cloudflare services for AI startups

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.

How to get on the startup plan as an AI startup

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 Continue reading

Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0

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 [email protected], 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.

What does the Cloudflare Startup Plan include?

There’s a lot of additional value that’s in the latest version of Continue reading

The Cloudflare Startup Enterprise Plan: helping new startups bootstrap

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.

What’s included in the Startup Enterprise plan?

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, Continue reading

Cloudflare Workers Recipe Exchange

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

What is Cloudflare Workers, anyway?

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.

What can you do with Continue reading

Cloudflare ♥ Open Source: upgrade to Pro Plan on the house

Happy Valentine's Day, Internet!

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.

A subset of open source projects on Cloudflare. See more >>

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 Continue reading

Upcoming Cloudflare events: Berlin May 5-7, Austin & Portland May 11

Attending JS Conf EU, CSS Conf, or OSCON in the next couple of weeks? Live in Berlin or Austin or Portland? Come over and join Cloudflare devs in the area at our upcoming events.

JS Conf EU 2016. Photo by Holger Blank.

In Berlin? Attending JS Conf EU or CSS Conf EU?

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.

In Austin? Attending OSCON?

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 Continue reading

Cloudflare Apps: Develop Features for Everyone

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.

Feline Mode

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.

Australia Mode

We believe access to the internet is a basic human right. It’s not enough to just be able to access it Continue reading