Workers is a product and you're paid to develop and sell it as an employee.

I 100% understand the hustle. I do the same thing. I just don't trust a giant like Cloudflare that has done several things to weaken the open web and establish a position that is all too powerful. I don't want to give them an iota of support. Even using open source buys into their mindshare, distribution, ecosystem, and eventual supremacy and lock-in.

I'd buy this from a smaller company for sure. Just not from Google, AWS, Cloudflare.

If this was a YC startup I'd have given you my credit card info already.

I don't know what your stock in Cloudflare is like, but your upside would be way bigger building this externally. You'd probably raise an extremely large seed round.

Consider launching your own startup. Don't give Cloudflare all the upside.

Edit: I didn't realize you'd already responded. Was clarifying my position and wishes for this to not be something made by Cloudflare.

I tried it as a startup once, so I know what that's like. It's a lot of time spent running around begging for money (from investors and from customers) rather than building technology.

Workers is my startup-within-Cloudflare. It won't make me a billionaire, but it has still made me more money than I actually know what to do with, while being able to delegate all the stuff I don't like doing to other parts of the company that already do it quite well.

I have a lot of influence here. The CEO and CTO listen to me. E.g. I made my argument this all needed to be open source and self hostable, and they agreed enthusiastically.

I don't think I could build this better as a separate company.