You've got a great web application.
CloudFlare's customers are website owners looking to improve their website.
Apps offer developers a platform for integrating great web applications with CloudFlare customers' websites.
CloudFlare is a global CDN with security, with plans that start at free.
Put another way, CloudFlare makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click.
CloudFlare is set up in five minutes through a simple DNS change. Alternatively, many web hosts offer CloudFlare as one-click option in your hosting provider's control panel.
CloudFlare Apps is a marketplace full of the web's leading apps, which can be installed on any site easily and instantly.
More than two dozen Apps are already available to sites using CloudFlare, resulting in 150,000 installs. Services range from advertising (VigLink) to translation (Smartling) to analytics (Clicky, Google Analytics) to monitoring (Pingdom, Monitis) and many more. See all live Apps.
Apps bring new customers to your web application and provides platform services for web applications, too.
Because CloudFlare's services are delivered as a reverse proxy for web traffic, running on its own global content delivery network (CDN) with a security layer, apps offer a powerful, easy-to-use integration to customers' websites, with no technical hurdles for website owners.
Here's a summary of apps' benefit for developers.
CloudFlare customers run websites of all sizes, in every country in the world.
As of April 2012, more than 300,000 domains are powered by CloudFlare. More than 460 million unique users/month (more than 25% of Internet's population view more than 36 billion page views/month on CloudFlare's network.
CloudFlare is already global. One-third of the traffic is within the United States, with the rest distributed around the world.
CloudFlare Apps is the right platform for web services of all sizes to reach new customers and successfully serve existing customers.
For independent developers, CloudFlare can help turn elegant code and design into recurring revenue.
For service providers, CloudFlare gets new customers turned on in a friction-free way.
CloudFlare customers can turn on Apps with a single click in their dashboard. That ON switch creates an account with your service, and enables it directly, all via secure API. CloudFlare provides a framework, but is also happy to use your existing framework, if available.
From that point forward, the CloudFlare dashboard links directly to the App's existing dashboard.
On the fly, CloudFlare can place customer-requested code in the website at the right place, without any work by the website owner.
For example, turning on the affiliate link service VigLink creates a VigLink account and instantly (within seconds) places customer-specific JavaScript on the customer's site globally.
CloudFlare App partners can host scripts and other App code necessary for deployment on CloudFlare customer sites on the CloudFlare global CDN for free. Note: JavaScript must be CloudFlareJS compliant, which is not difficult: documentation and sandbox.
Browser Blaster is from a Swedish teenager who took his open-source JavaScript code and turned it into a $0.99 game -- and he has no costs because his snippet is provisioned by CloudFlare.
Third-party scripts can drag down a site's performance, but CloudFlare won't let that happen. Through our asynchronous loader, CloudFlare improves performance of third-party scripts by pipelining them. This enhancement is part of the core Rocket Loader technology, applied specially to apps.
CloudFlare doesn't care whether the customer's website is running WordPress or MediaWiki or a custom Content Management System (CMS) or all of them at once. As a reverse proxy, CloudFlare operates regardless of webserver or CMS.
CloudFlare operates a global Anycast authoritative DNS service, and can programmatically create and edit records on behalf of our customers.
For example, in its CloudFlare App, the translation service Smartling automatically creates DNS records both to prove site ownership and create CNAMEs for language sites, such as http://es.cloudflare.com
CloudFlare can make developers money, for existing services or side projects.
Apps come in three forms, and sometimes a mix of these forms:
For Apps which require payment, CloudFlare handles all billing and credit card processing. Purchasing a new App becomes a one-click simple experience for customers, who can just add it to their existing CloudFlare invoice.
The developer sets the price(s) for paid Apps, and can set up multiple tiers. Seventy percent of revenue goes to the developer, paid monthly.
CloudFlare also supports one-time charges.
CloudFlare promotes and encourages App branding and attribution. We are celebrating the diversity of great web applications, and believe that fun, useful services should be known by their own name or brand -- no white-labeling.
CloudFlare introduces each new App with a blog post, and promotion to its thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Each new App introduced provides another opportunity for website owners to review the range of Apps available.
Every CloudFlare customer has Apps displayed prominently in their dashboard, for each domain on the service.
CloudFlare sends customers regular email about their CloudFlare statistics (bandwidth saved, threats blocked, etc.), and often includes news about new Apps.
We're open to other opportunities, too.
CloudFlare App API, for account creation and subscription management