The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it.

It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation.

I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused. It is definitely not something a developer will use.

I understand that you can bootstrap a number of systems but that is like half-hour of work and arguably it is probably a good idea to do it manually to make sure you have strong foundations.

I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. For example, Fly.io used to provision Sentry accounts automatically which you could not access in any other way but through Fly.io. I mean the Sentry account was effectively locked to a project that you cannot transfer - hijacking the actual global alias as well. Vercel did something similar with PostgreSQL via Neon and Redis via Upstash resulting in painful migration processes.

I can imagine ending in some kind of deadlock between services due to security hence why the 30 minutes initial setup is kind of time well spent to avoid future issues.

Maybe it's me.

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grey-area an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more.

Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.

	▲	riedel 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.

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ascorbic 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People use agents to deploy sites all the time. Buying a domain is part of that if you want to build a site that's beyond a toy. Allowing agents to do a task isn't just for things you do every day – it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help. It's not just devs using agents to perform these sort of tasks anymore.

Stripe Atlas makes it massively easier for startups to incorporate in Delaware. This is particularly hard for non-US founders. It solves a real problem. I don't think this part will be done by agents though!

Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare but not on this

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compounding_it 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> to what end?

People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. A web app who is an agent for a customer will then deploy agents in the backend to deploy the website too.

Basically what one would do manually, you tell one agent to make another agent do it.

Meta agents are where are going it seems.

	▲	tdeck 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. They've had WYSIWYG website builders since the late 1990s.

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hulitu 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it.

Just like it is usually used: spam and (D)DoS

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cromka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation.

Sorry, but no, you totally miss the fact there are domain farms which buy the dropped domains and then offer them up for sale. Bots now use AI to analyze the domain's value and automate the whole process. To be able to let AI buy it as well likely offers a tremendous amount of time saving.

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przmk an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It offers value to parasites who buy domains and resell them?

	▲	estimator7292 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Cloudflare gets a cut though, so it's valuable. As long as number go up, all good

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dawnerd 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And that goes back way further than AI. We were doing some crazy stuff at Demand Media with enom and all their fake content sites.

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Griffinsauce an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So actively making the internet worse. Awesome.

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misnome an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hasn’t all that been automated by people for decades anyway?

I guess this, lowers the barrier to entry for this extremely specific niche?

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2000UltraDeluxe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not like there aren't others who sell domains with an API. This doesn't change that much.

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fontain an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Complete and utter nonsense.

Domain registration is already API driven and has been for decades. The most sophisticated domain name investors (or "domain farms") go as far as to own registrars directly so they have instant access to the registries. Nobody involved in domains would use Cloudflare's product because they already have and have had automations for decades.

For example, DropCatch (NameBright) own over 1,000 different registrars so that they have over 1,000 direct routes to Verisign's .com registry. GName are a new player in the space, approaching 1,000 registrars. The amount these companies spend on their registrar licensing alone is many millions of dollars[1].

Cloudflare's product adds nothing new to the world of domains. Anyone has been able to go to OpenSRS and sign up as a reseller with API access for over 20 years.

[1] The majority of ICANN's registrar revenue comes from just a few companies that own thousands of registrars collectively: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids... cmd + f "DropCatch" and "GName"

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terrytys 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

lol, there are lots of people who aren't developers.