They're saying that it's trivial for Cloudflare to go up the stack (build Replit) while it's non-trivial for Replit to go down the stack (build Cloudflare).
People are over estimating Cloudflare's moat.
Staying in your lane is often a better choice.
Maybe expanding through acquisition is the best of both worlds. So replit might be bought.
Cloudflare is B2B focusing on enterprise sales and underlying cloud infrastructure. These app builder companies are basically B2C and lower end B2B.
A great time to expand your offerings is when there's an adjacent offering that's producing outsized returns for someone else, is easily replicable, and which you have an asymmetric advantage on.
I think everyone knows that when someone says "it's trivial" for a business to do something, it doesn't mean it's actually trivial. Doing anything of any value anywhere is non-trivial. It's shorthand for "doing Activity X is almost certainly achievable with an acceptable outlay of risk for Business Y."
This is absolutely not true, and proof that you completely misunderstood what I said.
You took an upmarket B2B infrastructure company and compared it to a low-end B2B/B2C software company. That is a completely different type of business.
Cloudflare launches new products and offerings all the time - and all B2B within their market space. The difference is that if they did what you suggest (make a Lovable), it would put them in a position of competing with their own customers, and it would have a chilling effect on selling more infrastructure to other companies who would then fear competition as well. It's not that they can't do it. It's that it is not wise for them to do so, and it's a different type of business entirely.
Cloudflare has already started releasing products that point in this direction. Not sure how far they will (or should) go, but it's really not categorically ridiculous or impossible or nonsensical, as you're implying.
Network effects make it harder for Cloudflare to build Replit than it might seem, too.
And the reason for Cloudflare to do it is because there are several (apparently) very juicy businesses to be built by slapping a chat UI and off the shelf coding agent on top of Cloudflare infra... Not saying they should do this, but the rationale is pretty self-evident.
The reason for Replit to try going down the stack is platform risk and compressing margins from competitors who also have the brilliant idea of slapping a text box and off the shelf coding agents onto Cloudflare.
It's like VPN service. Some other party comes along and offers it at 40% of the cost, you can do that.
Lovable is more nuanced. It takes more to move away, and there's just no reason to. The unit cost of Lovable buyeres is negligible aka less buyer sensitivity
It takes decades to build the kind of network cloudflare has.
“Please mr bezos, can I connect my new trivial network to yours?” “0.08/GB :)”
Lovable is a layer of abstraction, becoming as as complex as Shopify.
"It takes decades to build the kind of network cloudflare has."
It takes literally no time. Cloudflare's network could be emulated with proper planning and enough budget, and turned on instantly. 'Servers in 300 cities' is a medium sized challenge, but most importantly, it's a relatively clear path.
On the customer side, Cloudflare (in most cases) could be replaced as quickly as individuals replace their VPNs.
Shopify for example is ' just some siple HTML and checkout' - of course not - they are dominant and growing because there's a lot of complex interdependence, switching costs are much higher, their buyers are less technical and much less likely to want to change, and building a Shopify replacement involves hitting a lot of checkmarks.
Lovable started as a wrapper just as Shopify started with something simple, but they've quickly evolved.
AWS could snap their fingers and decide to knock out Cloudflare, it's a 'Commodity Plus' that came to the fore in a time when a specific need was there, and now people are turning to it out of convenience.
Of Lovable, Wix, Shopify, Figma, Stripe - Cloudflare is in the riskiest position because of the inherent commoditizability of their tech and the relatively low switching costs.
> Cloudflare's network could be emulated with proper planning and enough budget
lmfao
Shopify's core offer is a very long gnarly tail with any number of detail and moving parts, a massive eco system of 3rd party vendors, integations, and developer community.
Their service is sticky and switching costs are high.
It would literally cost more in Claude Code tokens to hack a prototype, than to sign up and host Shopify and get 100x the features. It's $0 to build the prototype and $1/mo to literally have a full product for the first 3 months.
At the same time, Claude Code can build you a full variation of Cloudflare's core product, and with less than $1M you can scale across 300 regions if you really put your mind to it.