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Comment by sjoedev | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I’m wary of what might happen when they need to become profitable. Could this be another case of a company offering an excellent, cheap product while being propped up by investors, only to later have an “enshittification” [2] phase where they aggressively cut corners and increase prices to make a profit?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NET/financials/annual...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

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>Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I’m wary of what might happen when they need to become profitable

The unit economics are sound. They have 76% gross margin, so it's not like they're selling $10 movie tickets for $8, and unlike companies like uber, they're probably not using their marketing spend to buy revenue (eg. spending $20 in promo credits to get $50 worth of sales). There's nothing wrong with a business that "unprofitable" when their unit economics work out, and are plowing their profits back into expanding the business.

Leaving out stock compensation in a non-gaap perspective would show they are close. Granted compensation is a real cost to value of shares, It's not as wide a delta as many other companies.

I would suspect they're going the other way and will continue to double down into new areas of services to expand their product line.

Cash flow positive. Margins look healthy. Spend lots of R&D which i would attribute to having $1.6B(2023) of capital on hand and being cash flow positive.

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