AI applications & software · Industry Index 13 (rank #87) ·
price: as of 2026-10-29 index: as of 2026-10-29 fundamentals: latest filing 2026-08-06 Reports quarterly (10-Q XBRL)
Cloudflare runs a global edge network for content delivery, security, and serverless compute, including GPU-backed Workers AI inference.
Industry exposure 0.3 (Workers AI and GPU inference are a growing edge-AI initiative, but the core business remains CDN, security, and networking.)
Delayed, end-of-day, aggregate per contract — not a live tape or trade-level flow. Buy/sell side is INFERRED from where each contract's last print sat in the bid/ask spread, not observed order flow. The company-wide side is withheld unless quoted contracts cover at least a quarter of the day's premium, so it can be blank while individual contracts below show a side. Call/put premium is measured across the chain we capture — the 6 nearest expiries within 45 days, not the full option chain — while the table below lists at most 20 flagged contracts, so summing those rows will not reproduce the percentage.
Why flagged:earnings in 8 days
| Date | Contract | Score | Side (inferred)? | OI Δ? | Volume | Vol/OI | Flags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-28 | $310 PUT | 40 | mid-market · no side | +147 | 387 | 0.5× | |
| 2026-10-28 | $330 CALL | 39 | buy-side | +1 | 593 | 0.4× |
18 smaller flags (under $100000 premium) hidden.
latest session: 1.0× its 13-day baseline
63% calls / 37% puts (by premium)
News led a bearish call; the other agents split, so conviction reflects the disagreement.
Most voters leaned one way; news dissented. Directional agreement 0.51.
A clear bearish score; conviction 0.29 reflects how strongly the agents agree. Conviction is confidence, not a probability of the move.
Cloudflare sells security, performance and connectivity as services delivered from one global anycast network rather than from boxes at a customer's edge. The FY2025 10-K frames the market as a consolidation away from enterprises that 'string together a diverse set of on-premises hardware boxes from different vendors' and away from 'stringing together multiple point-cloud solutions that only address specific network needs', toward one integrated provider it calls the Connectivity Cloud, and places Cloudflare as 'a leader in this Connectivity Cloud category'. The economics are unusual: idle capacity funds a free tier, the free tier buys global traffic scale, that scale makes Cloudflare a peering partner ISPs want, and peering cuts colocation and bandwidth cost - a loop the filing says 'become[s] even more powerful' as the network grows. Independent measurement confirms where that loop has already settled the market: W3Techs on 2026-09-17 shows an 85.0% reverse-proxy share and the largest authoritative-DNS footprint at 18.5% of all websites. Commercially the company ended 2025 with roughly 332,000 paying customers in more than 190 countries and 4,298 large customers, up from 2,756 two years earlier, with no customer above 10% of revenue. The contested half of the story is the growth half: the SASE platform competes with established cloud-security, email-security and SD-WAN vendors, and the developer platform competes for storage and compute against hyperscalers, markets where the 10-K's own risk factors concede rivals have greater name recognition, larger customer bases and 'more mature products and services developed for large customers'. The core is defended; the adjacencies are being fought for, and FY2025 gross margin at a nine-year low of 74.5% is the first visible cost of building GPU capacity for that fight.
Rating: wide
The band is earned by a measured share gap on a hard-to-rebuild asset, not asserted. W3Techs' 17 September 2026 survey (w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy) puts Cloudflare in front of 25.8% of all websites, an 85.0% share of the reverse-proxy market, against Amazon CloudFront at 5.5%, Fastly at 3.0% and Akamai at 2.1% - roughly fifteen times the nearest rival. The FY2025 10-K filed 2026-02-26 describes what a challenger would have to reproduce to contest that: a network that 'spans more than 330 cities in over 125 countries worldwide and interconnects with over 13,000 networks globally', architected to 'run every service on every server in every city' - capacity and peering accumulated city by city over a decade, not bought in a quarter. The position has been monetised without margin decay: SEC XBRL fundamentals on this site show GAAP gross margin inside a 74.5-78.7% band in every fiscal year from FY2017 to FY2025 while revenue grew from $134.9M to $2,167.9M, and Cloudflare's Q4/FY2025 results release of 2026-02-10 (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) reports remaining performance obligations up 48% and new annual contract value up nearly 50% year over year. What stops this being a certainty rather than a judgement: the dominant share sits in application services, while SASE and developer compute are contested by vendors the 10-K itself concedes hold 'substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources.'
Type: cost scale
The FY2025 10-K states the mechanism outright, and it is a unit-cost curve rather than a user-to-user network: 'We have chosen to utilize this idle capacity to create a free tier of service which has generated substantial global scale for us. In turn, this scale makes us attractive partners for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) globally, which reduces our co-location and bandwidth costs. As our network grows, these dynamics become even more powerful.' The same section explains why the curve applies to every line rather than one: the architecture lets Cloudflare 'deploy standard, commodity hardware' and run 'every service on every server in every city', so a new product reaches 330+ cities at near-zero incremental capital. That is what lets the filing claim Workers is offered 'at prices that are highly competitive with public cloud vendors' while FY2025 GAAP gross margin still printed 74.5%. Switching costs (traffic routed through Cloudflare, DNS delegated to it) and threat-intelligence feedback from aggregate traffic sit on top, but the filing-stated primary source is cost falling as the network grows.
Leadership: clear leader
Leadership is measured, not inferred. W3Techs on 2026-09-17 records an 85.0% reverse-proxy market share against 5.5% for Amazon CloudFront and 2.1% for Akamai, and makes Cloudflare the largest authoritative-DNS provider at 18.5% of all websites versus 9.9% for the next-placed GoDaddy Group. The FY2025 10-K reports the enterprise side moving the same way - 4,298 large customers at 2025 year-end against 3,497 a year earlier and 2,756 in 2023 - and the Q4/FY2025 results release (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) cites the largest annual contract value deal in company history at about $42.5M per year. The band is for the application-services core the share data covers; in SASE and in serverless compute Cloudflare is a challenger to larger incumbents, and no independent placement naming Cloudflare in those markets was obtained for this profile.
Pricing power: moderate
Evidence cuts both ways, which is why this is not the top band. For it: GAAP gross margin has never left a 74.5-78.7% band across FY2017-FY2025 (SEC XBRL fundamentals on this site) even as revenue compounded 16x, and the Q4/FY2025 results release (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) shows customers committing more rather than less - RPO +48% year over year and new ACV up nearly 50%. Against it: FY2025's 74.5% is the lowest reading in that nine-year series, a large permanent free tier anchors the entry price, the 10-K positions Workers 'at prices that are highly competitive with public cloud vendors', and the competition risk factor warns that larger rivals can 'sell products and services with which we compete at zero or negative margins, offer fee waivers and reductions or other economic and non-economic concessions', with competitive pressure that 'may result in price reductions, fewer subscriptions, reduced revenue and gross margin'.
Curated moat judgment grounded in the cited source. source: sec.gov
Layer: AI applications & software
Cloudflare sits between end users and whatever hosts the application - origin data centre, public cloud or SaaS - so it is a control layer in front of infrastructure rather than infrastructure a workload runs on, which the 10-K argues is the point: customers 'concerned about being locked in to any one public cloud provider' want policy enforced by 'an independent and integrated services provider'. Two AI-era roles follow from that position. As a supplier, the filing describes 'ongoing deployment of graphics processing units (GPUs) across our global network of servers' behind Workers AI, Vectorize and AI Gateway, putting inference next to the user instead of in a region. As a gatekeeper, the application-services suite now exists in part to 'easily identify, block and control access from AI crawlers and AI agents and operators' and underpins announced efforts to let content creators monetise how those crawlers reach their work - which makes Cloudflare a toll point between AI model builders and the open web.
Derived from this company's mapped supply-chain edges and its industry layer.
The moat prior voted +0.38 on the long (~6-month) horizon at weight 0.20 — the swarm call there is neutral (score 0.04, conviction 0).
Editorial prior — subjective, not backtested. It is bounded (±0.6), low-confidence, and never votes on short/medium. See exactly how it voted →
Products & services with an editorial market-share band and technical barrier band — qualitative judgments tied to a cited basis, never invented figures.
| Product | Market share | Technical barrier |
|---|---|---|
| Application Services · Application security, performance and delivery (CDN, WAF, DDoS, bot management, DNS resolution) The original suite and revenue core: Web Application Firewall, Bot Management and Turnstile, layer 3/4/7 DDoS mitigation, API Shield, SSL/TLS and certificate management, Page Shield, content delivery, load balancing, Smart Shield, video stream delivery and Waiting Room, delivered from the same network as everything else. | Leader W3Techs' reverse-proxy survey dated 17 September 2026 reports Cloudflare in front of 25.8% of all websites it monitors, an 85.0% share of the reverse-proxy services market, with Amazon CloudFront second at 5.5%, Fastly at 3.0%, DDoS-Guard at 2.4% and Akamai at 2.1%. | Deep Replication is physical and contractual, not a software project. The FY2025 10-K describes a network spanning 'more than 330 cities in over 125 countries' interconnected with 'over 13,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services, and enterprises'; DDoS absorption and cache-hit latency are functions of exactly that footprint, and the filing notes the free tier's traffic scale is what makes ISPs willing to peer and so keeps colocation and bandwidth cost down as it expands. |
| Authoritative DNS · Managed DNS and domain services Authoritative DNS for customer domains plus the 1.1.1.1 public resolver and Cloudflare Registrar; in practice the first product many customers adopt and the delegation that routes their traffic onto the network. | Leader W3Techs' DNS server provider survey dated 17 September 2026 shows Cloudflare as DNS provider for 18.5% of all websites it monitors, ahead of GoDaddy Group at 9.9%, Hostinger at 4.6%, Amazon at 3.4% and Google at 2.6% - first place by close to a factor of two. | Moderate Deep enough that the scale is real, shallow enough that it is not the moat: changing nameservers is a registrar-level action a customer can take in minutes, and the FY2025 10-K lists 'domain name system (DNS) services vendors' among the point-solution competitors it faces. What holds the position is anycast latency from the same 330-city footprint and the fact that DNS delegation is usually bundled with the security and delivery products rather than bought alone. |
| Developer Platform · Serverless compute, storage and databases Cloudflare Workers and Workers for Platforms, Pages, R2 object storage, D1 serverless SQL, Workers KV, Durable Objects, Hyperdrive and Queues, plus the Stream, Images and Realtime media services built on the same runtime. | Challenger The FY2025 10-K places this line directly against the hyperscalers - 'we believe we are increasingly competing with public cloud vendors for storage and compute workloads as more third-party developers utilize our serverless platform' - and calls it 'an entirely new market for us: storage and compute', i.e. a market Cloudflare is entering rather than holding. The filing names 'traditional public cloud vendors' among current competitors and elsewhere concedes those firms have 'substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources'. | Moderate Two genuine asymmetries, neither decisive yet. The 10-K says the efficiency of Workers lets Cloudflare price it 'highly competitive with public cloud vendors' and that running across the whole network 'enables the development of applications that were not previously possible on the traditional public cloud' - developers do not choose regions or scale containers. The 10-K's own product description has R2 Object Storage providing global object storage without egress fees, and the competition section names the pain that targets: 'Customers are concerned about being locked in to any one public cloud provider', which Cloudflare answers by moving data 'efficiently and inexpensively' between multiple clouds. Against that, the workload itself is code: a Worker is far easier to port than a corporate network is to re-architect. |
| SASE Platform (Cloudflare One) · Zero Trust, workplace security and corporate network services Zero Trust Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, the WARP client, Remote Browser Isolation, CASB, Cloud Email Security, DLP and Digital Experience Monitoring, combined with Magic WAN, Magic Transit, Magic Firewall, Network Interconnect and Spectrum as the connectivity half. | Challenger No independent share measurement naming Cloudflare in SSE or SASE was obtained for this profile, so the band rests on the FY2025 10-K's own competitive framing: it lists 'cloud security vendors', 'email security vendors' and 'cloud SD-WAN vendors' as current point-solution competitors and concedes that many existing and potential competitors hold 'greater name recognition', 'larger customer bases' and 'more mature products and services developed for large customers'. That is the description of a credible entrant taking share, not of the incumbent - unlike the reverse-proxy market, where third-party data shows Cloudflare at 85.0%. | Moderate The advantage carries over from the network. The 10-K's SASE pitch is a single pane of glass bringing together 'how employees connect, on-ramps for branch offices, secure connectivity for applications, and controlled access to SaaS applications', delivered 'by leveraging the public Internet' in place of the proprietary corporate networks the filing says carried 'a price tag that was prohibitive for most companies'. But the switching costs run in both directions: a SASE deployment is an enterprise identity and policy project, so displacing an entrenched rival is as slow as being displaced - which is why the barrier here is not the one the reverse-proxy footprint enjoys. |
| Workers AI and AI Gateway · Edge AI inference and AI application infrastructure Workers AI runs machine-learning models on serverless GPUs distributed across the network, Vectorize stores and queries embeddings, and AI Gateway adds observability, caching, security and routing in front of AI applications. | Niche The FY2025 10-K presents this as an in-flight build rather than an established position - the GPU rollout is described in the future tense, as an 'ongoing deployment of graphics processing units (GPUs) across our global network of servers, which will help our customers build performant AI into their applications natively'. No revenue, customer count or share figure is disclosed for the AI line, and it is not broken out from developer solutions, so nothing supports a higher band. | Moderate The defensible claim is placement, not silicon: inference running in 330+ cities sits closer to the end user than a regional cloud, and it rides capacity and peering the company already owns, which the 10-K says gets cheaper as the network grows. The limit is that frontier-model training and large-context inference need concentrated GPU clusters Cloudflare does not operate, so this competes for latency-sensitive and small-model work rather than for the whole market. |
These charts plot Cloudflare's reported income statement, cash flow, and balance sheet from its SEC filings through 2026-08-06. Every figure is as-filed XBRL — none of it is an estimate.
Over the reported window, revenue grew 1507% to $2.2B (FY2017→FY2025); gross margin moved 79% → 75%; net income at a loss of $102.3M in FY2025.
Analyst consensus — third-party estimates from Yahoo Finance, as of 2026-10-26. Not SEC filings and not a TradingPilot forecast. source: finance.yahoo.com
| Period | EPS (est.) | Revenue (est.) | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q/E Sep 2026 | USD 0.34 (USD 0.34–USD 0.37) · 29 | USD 738090880.00 (USD 736300000.00–USD 768444000.00) · 28 | +31% |
| FY 2026 | USD 1.26 (USD 1.25–USD 1.32) · 32 | USD 2.9B (USD 2.9B–USD 2.9B) · 31 | +32% |
Each figure shows the consensus mean, its (low–high) range where available, and · the number of analysts behind that estimate.
Next report ~2026-11-05.
Our model leans Low-confidence · Neutral on the stock over the medium horizon — a market-direction call, not an earnings forecast. See the Signal tab.
Some recent figures are from Yahoo Finance where the latest SEC filing hasn’t posted yet — FX-converted to USD and reconciled against SEC-filed periods.
Comparing against peers…
| Institution | Shares | Value | Δ shares QoQ | % of 13F | % shares out |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BlackRock Passive / index | 21,598,907 | $5.3B | 504,625 | 0.1% | — |
| FMR (Fidelity) Passive / index | 12,655,471 | $3.1B | -904,980 | 0.1% | — |
| State Street Passive / index | 7,420,765 | $1.8B | 242,046 | 0.1% | — |
| ARK Investment Management (Cathie Wood) Guru | 175,723 | $43.1M | -7,921 | 0.3% | — |
| Renaissance Technologies Guru | 171,400 | $42.0M | 171,400 | 0.1% | — |
| Bridgewater Associates (Ray Dalio (founder)) Guru | 6,720 | $1.6M | -2,038 | 0.0% | — |
TradingPilot-computed columns (% of 13F, % shares out) are derived from as-filed 13F values; only name, shares and value are as-filed.
Yahoo Finance (Business Wire) · 2026-10-19 · product
Cloudflare announced an expanded ecosystem for its AI workspace, including integrations with Asana, Box, Canva, ClickHouse, GitHub, Gong, Notion and ZoomInfo. Deployment partners include EPAM, HappyCog and Towards AI. Cloudflare describes the platform as a way to connect enterprise agents to existing systems with access controls.
Cloudflare Blog · 2026-10-09 · partnership
Cloudflare said the Deno team, including Deno creator Ryan Dahl, is joining the company to simplify self-hosting of Workers and Durable Objects, and that Cloudflare's open-source workerd runtime will be merged with Deno's celld. The post did not disclose financial terms.
Google News: Cloudflare · 2026-07-12 · earnings
Cloudflare's Q1 earnings topped estimates as revenue grew strongly on large customer additions.
2026-10-30 PR Newswire Financial Services · BNCCORP, INC. REPORTS THIRD QUARTER NET INCOME OF $3.0 MILLION, OR $0.85 PER DILUTED SHARE
2026-10-28 Yahoo Finance: NET · Did AI Partnerships Just Shift Cloudflare (NET) Stock Narrative?
2026-10-28 Yahoo Finance: NET · Cloudflare (NET) Could Be 49% Overvalued Following Fresh AI Commerce Traction
2026-10-28 Yahoo Finance: NET · Cloudflare (NET) Expands AI Reach With Browser Shopping And Workplace Tools
2026-10-26 Yahoo Finance: NET · What Sent Cloudflare Stock Higher?
2026-10-26 Yahoo Finance: NET · Cloudflare (NET) Exceeds Market Returns: Some Facts to Consider
2026-10-26 Yahoo Finance: NET · Is Cloudflare (NET) a Buy as Wall Street Analysts Look Optimistic?
2026-10-23 PR Newswire Financial Services · FLAGSTAR BANK REPORTS THIRD QUARTER 2026 NET INCOME ATTRIBUTABLE TO COMMON STOCKHOLDERS OF $0.01 PER DILUTED SHARE
2026-10-23 Yahoo Finance: NET · Cloudflare (NET) Stock May Trade At A Rich Sales Premium
2026-10-22 Yahoo Finance: NET · Cloudflare (NET) Stock Moves -1.18%: What You Should Know
2026-10-21 Yahoo Finance: DDOG · Cloudflare Soars 6% as PHP Flaw Hitting 70% of Websites Lifts Security Stocks
2026-10-21 PR Newswire Tech · Resolve Therapeutics Presents Preclinical Data on NET Degradation and Nuclease Therapy in Acute Ischemic Stroke at the World Stroke Conference
2026-10-21 Business Wire AI · Mehr als 10 Millionen Entwickler nutzen Cloudflare für ihre Projekte
2026-10-21 Business Wire AI · Más de 10 millones de desarrolladores están creando aplicaciones en Cloudflare
2026-10-20 Business Wire AI · More than 10 Million Developers Are Building on Cloudflare
2026-10-19 Business Wire AI · La plataforma AI Workspace de Cloudflare colabora con aplicaciones líderes y equipos de implementación para potenciar la productividad de la IA en la empresa
2026-10-19 Business Wire AI · Cloudflare’s AI Workspace Platform Partners with Leading Applications and Deployment Teams to Make AI Productive in the Enterprise
2026-10-14 PR Newswire Tech · Introducing Chainguard Libraries for Go and .NET: Secure Endpoints to Protect Organizations from Supply Chain Attacks
2026-10-13 Yahoo Finance: NET · What Was Cloudflare Telling You Before Its Stock Ran?
2026-10-13 Yahoo Finance: NET · Cloudflare Announces Date of Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results
Impact = company-prominence tier (High/Medium auto-assigned by graph centrality/size; Low only on curated minor events), not a magnitude forecast.
| Date | Type | Event | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-05 | earnings | Cloudflare earnings (estimated) — Date not yet announced — estimated from EDGAR filing cadence (last periodic filing + 91/365 days); confirm via IR. estimated | Medium |
| Date | Event | Impact | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-06 | Cloudflare earnings confirmed | Medium | EPS beat · +5.6% |
| 2026-05-07 | Cloudflare earnings confirmed | Medium | EPS beat · -23.6% |
