[Abishek_Muthian]

Yeah, What's up with the competition to Cloudflare? What's the real barrier for entry?

It's not infrastructure anymore, As there is a new PaaS startup every week offering distributed hosting and So why bundling in DNS, DDOS detection+mitigation, cloud workers... with it is so hard?

[richdougherty]

This is just my take, but Cloudflare looks to be building a "moat" to make entry hard. This is built around two things: 1. economies of scale, 2. a network effect.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

As Cloudflare gets bigger, they can provide services more cheaply. This is because (a) they can more fully utilise their data centres and other physical capital investments, (b) they can divide their fixed software costs over more users and (c) they get process efficiencies and discounts with scale.

A new entrant will struggle to match cost unless they're able to obtain similar scale. The bigger Cloudflare gets, the bigger the scale that a new entrant needs to hit before they can match them on cost.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Second they're aiming to build a network effect through having huge number of locations. The more locations, the more appealing to new customers as they can be close to more users. A competitor will have to build a similar number of locations to match Cloudflare's proposition.

A new entrant cannot provide as much value, and therefore cannot charge as high a price, without building a similar sized network. This again requires the entrant to invest heavily before they can charge a similar price.

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The combination of these two things mean that when Cloudflare is operating at a large scale with a large network it can offer a more valuable service (and charge a higher price) than a new entrant, and earn more profit because it can operate at a lower cost.

Also, Cloudflare has the option of lowering its price and still being profitable due to lower costs at its scale, so it can deter entrants from trying to compete by the threat of being able to lower prices below what is profitable for new entrants.

The only players who can compete may be those who already have comparable size - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, CDNs, etc, since they will already have addressed the issues of scale and network effects. However, they may not want to cannibalise their existing markets. It will be hard for other new entrants to compete.

[subvarad]

There are many noteworthy players - Akamai, Fastly etc., and Edge plaoviders like ourselves (Zycada) who complement top CDNs like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly.

[Abishek_Muthian]

The main difference between Cloudflare and the others mentioned is the price; One can start with CF for a side project for free and continue to use it free till it becomes a viable startup.

Others at best offer a limited trial plan, But most are just 'Speak to expert/ Contact us' for pricing which means haggling with a sales rep while we can just build things. Even the paid plans of CF is reasonable when compared with others with better features.

[jgrahamc]

It's hard at scale.

[Abishek_Muthian]

Isn't everything harder at scale? That's not a barrier for entry though.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Building a CDN absolutely is hard to do at scale.

You can't build a Cloudflare competitor in AWS/Azure/Linode/DO/etc. You need your own data centers. Multiple of them across the country, ideally around the world if you want to serve the whole world.

This is insanely hard.

[andrewnyr]

for a global cdn... it quite literally is

[Abishek_Muthian]

Point taken, For a Global CDN - scale is the point of entry.