Cloudflare’s Number of Paying Customers (2018-2023)

This statistic highlight Cloudflare’s Number of Paying Customers from Q1 2018 onwards, reported on a quarterly basis.

Cloudflare’s number of paying customers

(All figures in millions, except percentages)

Cloudflare generated total revenue of $138.05 million in Q1 2021 which has grown by 52% year-over-year basis from Q1 2020. Cloudflare’s financial success depends on its ability to retain and upgrade its existing paying customers, enticing new paying customers and also converting the free customers into paying customers. 

Thus the increase in revenue was primarily due to the addition of new paying customers as well as the expansion within its existing paying customers. Cloudflare was successful in attracting 29.99 million new customers which resulted in a total of 119.21 million paying customers in Q1 2021. There was a 34% year-over-year growth in the number of paying customers from Q1 2020.

Cloudflare defines its paying customer at the end of the quarter as a person or entity who has generated revenue in that quarter. Entity refers to a government institution, a business unit of a large company, or a non-profit organization with an active contract with Cloudflare or with any of its partners.

While its paying customers are across all sizes, its large customers usually contribute a major share of the revenue. Large customers are those whose Annualized Revenue is greater than $100,000. Annualized Revenue at the end of a quarter is calculated by taking the sum of revenue of each customer in a quarter and multiplying it by four. The number of paying customers with Annualized Revenue greater than $100,000 was 945 in Q1 2021 which grew by approximately 70% from 556 customers in Q1 2020.

Paying customers are classified as pay-as-you-go customers and contracted customers.

• Pay-as-you-go customers: For pay-as-you-go customers, Cloudflare offers Pro and Business subscription plans through their website and customers subscribe to it to cover multiple Internet properties like domains, application programming interfaces (APIs), websites, and mobile applications. Pro plan provides facilities to improve the reliability, security, and performance of the application like image and mobile optimization whereas the Business plan includes facilities that are usually provided to larger organizations.For pay-as-you-go customers, the service implementation period is extremely short. Through Cloudflare’s pay-as-you-go offering, customers can pay monthly with a credit card, they can subscribe to any plans, and begin using the network within minutes. This has allowed Cloudflare to acquire a large portion of paying customers at lower customer acquisition costs.

• Contracted customers: Contracted customers are those who have entered into a contract for Cloudflare’s Enterprise Subscription Plan. Such contracts range from one year to three years and are billed every month. The sales cycle of contracted customers typically lasts for less than a quarter. The agreements with contracted customers are tailored-made and are priced according to the need and requirements of the customers. 

Company overview

Cloudflare, Inc. is a U.S.-based company established in July 2009 by Lee Holloway, Matthew Prince, and Michelle Zatlyn. It has a huge network that covers almost 206 cities and more than 100 countries worldwide. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California. Cloudflare completed its initial public offering in 2019 and its common stocks are listed on New York Stock Exchange under the trading symbol “NET”. 

Cloudflare, Inc. is a website security company that provides an array of products and services like TLSSSL/TLS for SaaS Providers, Cloudflare Spectrum, DDoS Protection, Content delivery network, Load Balancing, image optimizer, Network Interconnect, and built-in visitor analytics. Since the complexities are increasing with time, Cloudflare provides services that help its customers in improving the reliability, security, and performance of websites.

Cloudflare caters to customers of all sizes and types including small businesses, large organizations, startups, governments, and also eCommerce. Approximately 17% of the Fortune 1000 were paying customers of Cloudflare as of March 2021. Microsoft Azure CDN, Amazon CloudFront, Succri, KeyCDN, and StackPath CDN are the major competitors of Cloudflare.

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