I quickly realized Cog was an obstacle rather than an accelerator. I replaced it with a lightweight FastAPI layer, which immediately unblocked me:
1. Native I/O with Google Cloud Storage.
2. Freedom to use the latest Torch and Nvidia Docker images without abstraction overhead.
3. Running Torch and TensorFlow in parallel (legacy model constraints that Cog struggled with).
The answer to that question is likely this acquisition.
The standalone AI middleware market is precarious; the landscape shifts too fast and technical founders will eventually outgrow the training wheels.
Folding into Cloudflare gives the team a sustainable home to leverage the platform's scale, rather than competing solely on a container abstraction layer.
Wish them the best. Cloudflare’s infrastructure is likely the right environment to turn this into a high-leverage product
It's less obvious why Cloudflare want Replicate.
As for the price:
> Replicate has raised $52.5M in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, with last known valuation of $350M [2023]
It would be interesting to know how much hype there is in valuations since 2023. I assume it's mostly vesting options because I doubt Cloudflare has the cash to throw around. I would guess $500M valuation but I could be off by a lot.
I think they want to be the provider of inference for specialized slm's. Replicate is a perfect acquisition for that, they have a large catalog of smaller models.
With the acquisition they are saying that they have made enough improvements for the next step, earning money from those improvements.
They are a huge, huge middleman of internet traffic and many, many services.
Replicate is joining Cloudflare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45953702 - Nov 2025 (68 comments)
What was the value of the transaction?
So the team is joining cloudflare...?
That's not a given as well. An acquisition usually involves restructuring the acquired company, sometimes in a way where the original team ceases to exist.
> This is what is galling. A company that can afford to pay millions for some new staff but not for what those staff built. The people who used the service, and invested their belief and time in uploading photos, or forming friendships, or logging data, are left to find new virtual homes while their former hosts enjoy a nice (if possibly delayed) payday.
> This repeated pattern only encourages more people to create flashy services that have no hope of being sustainable businesses in their own right, but may survive long enough, with VC funding, to attract the attention of a large company eager for new ideas and staff.
The last paragraph is what gets me -- it makes sense to me found startups in hopes to be acquired (continue their work with the support of a big company), but founding with the intention to abandon your users? Yuck.
I think this is being intentionally kept under wraps, so nobody who can say anything knows.
> We’ll be able to do things like run fast models on the edge, run model pipelines on instantly-booting Workers, stream model inputs and outputs with WebRTC, etc.
Benefit to 3rd party developers is reducing latency and improving robustness of AI pipeline. Instead of going back and forth with https request at each stage to do inference you could make all in one request, e.g. doing realtime, pipelined STT, text translation, some backend logic, TTS and back to user mobile device.
Hard disagree. Performance is typically the most important feature for any website. User abandonment / bounce rate follows a predictable, steep, nonlinear curve based on latency.
There's this old meme of Amazon seeing a difference for every 100ms latency and I've never seen it actually reproduced in a controlled way. Even when CF tries to advertise lower latency https://www.cloudflare.com/en-au/learning/performance/more/w... their data is companies reducing it by whole seconds. "Walmart found that for every 1 second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%" - that's not steep. When there's a claim about improvements per 100ms, it's still based on averaging multi-second data like in https://auditzy.com/blog/impact-of-fast-load-times-on-user-e...
In short - if you have something extremely interactive, I'm sure it matters for experience. For a typical website loading in under 1s, edge will barely matter. If you have data proving otherwise, I'd genuinely love to see that. For websites loading in over 1s, it's likely much easier to improve the core experience than split thing out into edge.
My point about the shape of the curve stands. 100ms can matter more on the steepest part of the slope than 2s does further to the right.
Fastforward to today, they being hated foe bringing down the internet, compared to failing giants.
I think it is a reminder that evil and good recides within oneself.
They and Prince may never go that way, as someone who occasionally picked SaaS/infra stocks, the ratio of their market share/customers metrics to revenues/profit vs other peers was always on the low side (haven't look at their numbers in a while tho)
- Their dashboard is next to GCP in terms of how bad it is.
- They ship like three different CLIs that'll often have overlapping functionality: wrangler, c3, cloudflared and flarectl. It feels like an organizationally confused tooling strategy dumped on the user.
- Docs are often out of date
They really need to learn a thing or two from Vercel on the DX
It's more like "organizations that attain monopoly position find themselves in a bubble that becomes disconnected from reality, regardless of the quality of their intentions".
Most recent example is Google. Cloudflare next, probably.
HN has become a forum where old school enthusiasts complain loudly about modern tech while refusing to examine the fact that they’re doing it on a forum that’s inherently built to stimulate the very capitalism they decry.
I have used their products and have more favor toward them than I do for the corporations you're referring to, but ultimately my question is the same.
Replicate is joining Cloudflare
Because a lot of money was transferred from Cloudflare's bank account to the bank accounts of the stockholders of Replicate?
Why do I have a shovel? Because I transferred $48 to Home Depot's bank account.
Home Depot sold you a shovel because you had $48 to spare. they don't care about the why.
Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare? Because you paid money to acquire it. Why the fuck else? Ffs.
Maybe when the AI overlords take over Cloudflare will be our last bastion of defense. :D
https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...