Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare
(blog.cloudflare.com)81 points by chmaynard a day ago
81 points by chmaynard a day ago
Me too. After trying it out I found Cog to be super frustrating to use and the only use case for me ended-up being trying out a new model through the web UI occasionally.
It's maybe obvious why Replicate might want to be part of Cloudflare.
It's less obvious why Cloudflare want Replicate.
As for the price:
> Replicate has raised $52.5M in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, with last known valuation of $350M [2023]
It would be interesting to know how much hype there is in valuations since 2023. I assume it's mostly vesting options because I doubt Cloudflare has the cash to throw around. I would guess $500M valuation but I could be off by a lot.
Cloudflare has made considerable improvements in running small models in gpu's world-wide ( loading multiple small models).
I think they want to be the provider of inference for specialized slm's. Replicate is a perfect acquisition for that, they have a large catalog of smaller models.
With the acquisition they are saying that they have made enough improvements for the next step, earning money from those improvements.
Recent and related:
Replicate is joining Cloudflare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953702 - Nov 2025 (68 comments)
I searched but could not find the "bought" or "money" or "dollar" or "stock" words in the marketing fluff piece, so it definitely does not answer the question in the title.
What was the value of the transaction?
> CloudFlare bought the company and is keeping the team.
So the team is joining cloudflare...?
> So the team is joining cloudflare...?
That's not a given as well. An acquisition usually involves restructuring the acquired company, sometimes in a way where the original team ceases to exist.
It's a pretentious way of saying they acquired them. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/
Let us see if Replicate and Cog are shut down, and it becomes an Incredible Journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/post/89180616013/wha...
> An incredible journey is: One company buying another and closing its services down. This is a purchase of the second company’s staff, rather than their product. An acquihire.
> This is what is galling. A company that can afford to pay millions for some new staff but not for what those staff built. The people who used the service, and invested their belief and time in uploading photos, or forming friendships, or logging data, are left to find new virtual homes while their former hosts enjoy a nice (if possibly delayed) payday.
> This repeated pattern only encourages more people to create flashy services that have no hope of being sustainable businesses in their own right, but may survive long enough, with VC funding, to attract the attention of a large company eager for new ideas and staff.
The last paragraph is what gets me -- it makes sense to me found startups in hopes to be acquired (continue their work with the support of a big company), but founding with the intention to abandon your users? Yuck.
The did explain a little bit:
> We’ll be able to do things like run fast models on the edge, run model pipelines on instantly-booting Workers, stream model inputs and outputs with WebRTC, etc.
Benefit to 3rd party developers is reducing latency and improving robustness of AI pipeline. Instead of going back and forth with https request at each stage to do inference you could make all in one request, e.g. doing realtime, pipelined STT, text translation, some backend logic, TTS and back to user mobile device.
You are seemingly answering something that they did not ask at all
Does edge inference really solve the latency issue for most use cases? How does cost compare at scale?
So how long until Cloudflare joins the hated monopolies list?
Tech is full of ironies. 5 years ago cloudflare was held as the savior of internet. People in HN and tech in general put them on pedestal. 1.1.1.1, generous ddos protection, cdn, adn to name a few.
Fastforward to today, they being hated foe bringing down the internet, compared to failing giants.
I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
your comment actually made me think about this, cloudflare hasn't actually turned full monopolist... yet, their generous free tier has led to monopoly like market share but the pain society feels is when they go down, they haven't turned the screw to make monopoly (or hyperscaler) profits
They and Prince may never go that way, as someone who occasionally picked SaaS/infra stocks, the ratio of their market share/customers metrics to revenues/profit vs other peers was always on the low side (haven't look at their numbers in a while tho)
Some parallels to gmail, which similarly rose to dominance by offering a free tier that was leagues above what everyone else was offering. They were also hailed as the savior, followed by a period of disillusionment. Now plenty of competitors have caught up with almost-as-good free offerings, but the world is still much more centralized than it was before
I have no comment on Cloudflare being evil, but if you actually try to use their hosting products which come with a generous free tier, you realize how bad the DX is:
- Their dashboard is next to GCP in terms of how bad it is.
- They ship like three different CLIs that'll often have overlapping functionality: wrangler, c3, cloudflared and flarectl. It feels like an organizationally confused tooling strategy dumped on the user.
- Docs are often out of date
They really need to learn a thing or two from Vercel on the DX
> I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
It's more like "organizations that attain monopoly position find themselves in a bubble that becomes disconnected from reality, regardless of the quality of their intentions".
Most recent example is Google. Cloudflare next, probably.
HN changed, is what happened. The tech startup crowd has sadly migrated to Twitter, and I guarantee you they still love Cloudflare.
HN has become a forum where old school enthusiasts complain loudly about modern tech while refusing to examine the fact that they’re doing it on a forum that’s inherently built to stimulate the very capitalism they decry.
Their entire business model is effectively centralizing the web. The downtime over the last two weeks shows some of the problem with that.
I have used their products and have more favor toward them than I do for the corporations you're referring to, but ultimately my question is the same.
Because Replicate has no chance of beating Fal or Together?
Okay, this is the kind of post I have not read and will never read but I will still comment.
Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare? Because you paid money to acquire it. Why the fuck else? Ffs.
Cloudflare literally offers a paid scraping API as one of its services.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...
Buying an AI company when you have a monopoly on scraping most of the internet seems like good business sense.
I gave Replicate a shot but needed to run on my own GPUs, so I initially used Cog to port the workload.
I quickly realized Cog was an obstacle rather than an accelerator. I replaced it with a lightweight FastAPI layer, which immediately unblocked me:
It forces the question: What is Replicate's value proposition for a startup where the founders are competent engineers? If you aren't afraid of a Dockerfile, the "ease of use" premium evaporates.The answer to that question is likely this acquisition.
The standalone AI middleware market is precarious; the landscape shifts too fast and technical founders will eventually outgrow the training wheels.
Folding into Cloudflare gives the team a sustainable home to leverage the platform's scale, rather than competing solely on a container abstraction layer.
Wish them the best. Cloudflare’s infrastructure is likely the right environment to turn this into a high-leverage product