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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

There isn't any particular reason why Amazon might not decide one day to copy Cloudflare as one of their services.

And then all clients of Cloudflare that are also AWS clients will switch to AWS for the same service, same cost, but one less headache.

On the other hand, Cloudflare is unable to copy AWS business model.

So, revised title: "AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go on a board and time borrowed from Amazon"

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AWS doesn't need to copy Cloudflare. It already has literally everything Cloudflare does in their catalog already. In spite of this Cloudflare is still attracting customers at premium prices.

There is one: Cloudflare isn't profitable.

Cloudflare is still in growth mode: They're losing money hand-over-fist. AWS, on the other hand, is a money-printing machine.

Personally, I don't trust Cloudflare until they achieve profitability. They're going to have to raise their rates one day, and alienate the majority of their customers.

Probably not really losing money, depends on the cost of bandwidth. Since CF has purchased tons of pipes, it doesn't cost them that much to feed slightly more traffic into it.

I'm not really worried about the cost of traffic. According to their latest 10-Q [0] they earned 152 million and spent 187 million for a net loss of 35 million. About 76 million of that (40.6%) went to sales, so they're certainly not spending it on the pipes. But despite a large increase in sales spending they're less profitable than they were during the same period a year earlier. They're losing $1.23 for every dollar they earn.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/0001...

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