> I don't know what you mean by "trusted",

It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".

CloudFlare is FedRAMP high. This is a pretty big deal for a lot of a certain type of system owners.

There is nothing wrong with “inserting yourself in the middle of everybody’s business”. That is how you reduce friction between parties and make optimizations that are only possible by being able to manage both sides of the connection. It’s also a really good way to make money.

CloudFlare AI Gateway was quite convenient for me - I wanted to give my zeroclaw instance a limited budget to services like Image generation/Replicate/Fal.ai, which would mean for each service I'd have to run my own proxy that stores the keys and cuts off the real calls if we go over the limits. Easy to do but still extra thing to build and maintain.

Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.

edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all

> A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all

Extremely hard to verify it's been done properly across a large organization.

Same way people trust Microsoft: "We already use them, and using them for this additional service exposes no data they wouldn't already have access to from all the other services we buy from them"

I trust Cloudflare more than I trust some other players in the arena. They have a decent track record of being neutral infrastructure provider. They seem technically strong, deploying Rust widely and caring about performance in a way that most firms do not. They're likely covertly funded by intelligence services so they don't have economic incentives to enshitify their offerings or deliberately screw me over.

Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.

They give you the tools. Your options are:

- let more traffic in, eat the compute cost

- block larger cohorts of traffic, affect many real users

- babysit the rules to get them just right, lose time doing that

In my experience the residential proxies exist but are not that common and many aren't trying as hard as they could. It's really a war of which side wants to spend more attention on the problem.