Cloudflare made it much easier to become an indie founder

Our software is built on top of other software.

When we release a new feature, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities for our users to do things they couldn't do before.

The same is true for the software that powers our software. When they release something new, it opens up a whole world of possibilities of building something that was previously expensive/inconvenient to build.

In the past 2 months, Cloudflare has released several such products. This is fantastic for bootstrapped founders; rather than hiring a team of expensive infrastructure engineers, we can now simply build on top of Cloudflare products and ship our MVP faster.

Let's take a look at what Cloudflare has recently made much easier to build.

1. Build real-time video and audio apps cheaply

There are several types of real-time apps, including those that do:

• One-to-one broadcasting. This is about connecting 2 separate individuals, one-to-one.
• One-to-many broadcasting. This is When you want to broadcast a live or recorded video to multiple viewers.
• Many-to-many broadcasting. This is when you want to connect many people at the same time (think Zoom).

Cloudflare recently made building such apps incredibly convenient and cheap. Here's how:

One to one and one-to-many: On September 21st, Cloudflare announced that its "Stream Live" service is generally available to everyone. This is a feature that allows developers to build live video features in websites and native apps.

What this allows you to create: Here are some ideas:

• An app that enables people to create online TV stations.
• A platform to connect artists who do live concerts to fans
• A webinar software

It's cheap: Google and other third-party software already have live streaming APIs. But the pricing is quite expensive compared to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare charges $1 per 1000 minutes delivered (no matter the resolution, etc.) In comparison, other services charge $6 per 100 minutes of video just for transcoding.

If your live streaming SaaS gets some traction, you can easily imagine how costs will skyrocket with something like Google. With Cloudflare, you can stay bootstrapped for much longer as your app grows.

Real-time live streaming: Here's one fact about real-time video: it's not really…real time.

There's a thing called latency and providers like YouTube and Facebook do face latency issues. This means that it could take up to 20 seconds (or more) between the time you stream your video and the time your viewers see it.

On September 27th Cloudflare has announced live streaming with sub-second latency, which is a huge deal if you want to build something like:

• Live sports betting
• Live video auctions
• Live viewer Q&As
• Real-time collaboration and interaction of all sorts

All this just became possible thanks to this feature. With no dependencies. According to Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Stream with WebRTC lets you build live streaming into your app as a front-end developer, without any special knowledge of video protocols. And our approach, using the WHIP and WHEP open standards, means you can do this with zero dependencies, with 100% your code that you control.

That's pretty neat.

Many-to-many: On September 27th, Cloudflare announced "Cloudflare Calls", a set of APIs where you can build things like:

• A video conferencing app with a custom UI
• An interactive conversation where the moderators can invite select audience members “on stage” as speakers
• A privacy-first group workout app where only the instructor can view all the participants while the participants can only view the instructor
• Remote 'fireside chats' where one or multiple people can have a video call with an audience of 10,000+ people in real time (100ms delay)
• Interactive webinar software where audience members can join an do live Q&A

Currently Cloudflare Calls is in closed beta, but with the ways things are going, I expect it to move to at least open-beta and/or general availability by mid-2023.

Bootstrappers can now build real-time apps: With this kind of pricing, we could build a whole range of B2B/B2C tools that were very expensive & required a large capital to build.

2. Host files without worrying about bandwidth

On September 29th, Cloudflare announced that its R2 service is generally available.

R2 is like Amazon S3, but without bandwidth costs: Yup, they only charge you for storage ($0.015 GB/month) and read/write operations ($0.36 per million class B/reading operations and $4.5 per million class A/writing operations).

This has prompted developers to wonder whether this is too good to be true. So far, nobody has reported that their account got disabled due to them going over the top with bandwidth. Cloudflare has a pretty decent reputation when it comes to reliability, so this is not surprising.

What this makes it possible to create: Basically, you could do something like:

• An Image hosting service where you don't have to be afraid about a specific customer getting viral and consuming GBs of bandwidth.
• File hosting service with competitive pricing.
• A backup service/tool which is priced competitively.

Just one seemingly small change (not charging for bandwidth) can pave the way for a slew of new bootstrapped ideas that were previously expensive to build.

3. Website popularity tools

On 30th November, Cloudflare announced "Radar Domain Rankings", a weekly-updated list of the most popular domains on the web.

Amazon had a service named Alexa which it shut down at the end of 2021. Alexa provided a "top million" list of the most popular domains on the web.

The list by Cloudflare has a different format, where you could get the "top 200/500/1,000/5,000 etc. domains:

What you could build with it: Any business wants to know how it compares to competitors in overall popularity. You could build a tool around that, which notifies people when a site they monitor got from the top 200k into the top 100k sites, for example.

Another idea is to create a service that will discover "trending" websites that have a rapid increase in traffic. You could also then analyze the reason behind the growth.

4. Tools to play with incoming email

Receiving individual email is not as easy as you think. You need to worry about servers, uptime, programming logic, etc.

On 25th October, Cloudflare announced that its Email routing service is leaving beta. You can also use email routing via an API.

What is email routing: Basically a way to handle incoming email. You can create as many email addresses on a domain as you want, and also create rules on how those should be handled. And yes, there's an anti-spam algorithm.

What this enables us to create: You can use programmable email in all sorts of use-cases:

• Email forwarding services
• A way for people to communicate via email on a marketplace, for example
• Anonymized communication, etc.

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5. Managed, cheap databases

On May 11th, Cloudflare announced its plans for D1, a managed SQLite database.

4 months later they announced a queue database, without the bandwidth fees.

If you've been doing web apps and/or produced databases, you'll appreciate hosted databases. So a service like Cloudflare getting into this is definitely worth paying attention to.

What you could build with: This is more about how easy it is to get started up and running. Services like DigitalOcean made it easy to get a managed database. Cloudflare should make it even easier.

Which Cloudflare feature you plan to build around?