Cloudflare, Inc. (NET)

Item 2. MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our condensed consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. In addition to historical financial information, the following discussion contains forward-looking statements that are based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those factors discussed in the section titled “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Our fiscal year end is December 31.

Overview

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We have built a global network that delivers a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies—making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware. Our network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across their on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In addition, the distributed and programmable nature of our network increasingly is resulting in our customers building their applications on top of our network, too — including both traditional applications and those that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).

Our Business Model

Our business model benefits from our ability to serve the needs of all customers ranging from individual developers to the largest enterprises, in a cost-effective manner. Our products generally are easy to deploy and allow for rapid and efficient onboarding of new customers and expansion of our relationships with our existing customers over time. Given the large customer base we have and the immense amount of Internet traffic that we manage, we are able to negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with Internet service providers (ISPs) that allow us to place our equipment directly in their data centers, which drives down our bandwidth and co-location expenses. This symbiotic relationship that we have with ISPs and the efficiency of our serverless network architecture allows us to introduce new products on our network at low marginal cost.

We generate revenue primarily from sales to our customers of subscriptions to access our network and products. We offer a variety of plans to our free and paying customers depending on their required features and functionality.

•Contracted customers. Our contracted customers, which consist of customers that enter into contracts for our Enterprise subscription plan, have contracts that typically range from one to three years and are typically billed on a monthly or annual basis. Our agreements with contracted customers are tailored and priced to meet their varying needs and requirements. Enterprise subscription plan agreements for our contracted customers generally include a base subscription and, in some cases, a portion based on variable usage. Agreements with certain of our larger enterprise customers may be structured as a "pool of funds" in which the customer commits to spend at least a specified amount on our products during the subscription period. These “pool of funds” arrangements do not require the customer to subscribe for specific products or spend any specific amounts during any month, quarter or, if applicable, year of the subscription period, but the funds must be utilized during the subscription period under the terms of these subscription agreements.

•Pay-as-you-go customers. For our pay-as-you-go customers, we offer the ability to purchase our products through our website. We make our pay-as-you-go product solutions available in several configurations. For customers securing and accelerating their Internet properties using our website and application services, we offer Pro and Business subscription plans through our website per registered domain, and it is common for customers to purchase subscriptions to cover multiple Internet properties (e.g., domains, websites, application programming interfaces (APIs), and mobile applications). Pay-as-you-go customers can subscribe to more than one solution and purchase add-on products and network functionality we offer to meet their more advanced needs. For pay-as-you-go or contracted customers who need a scalable Zero Trust security solution to secure users and internal resources using our Zero Trust and network services solutions, we make these products available on a per seat basis. In addition, for developers building serverless applications, we offer our developer solutions products to these customers on a usage-based plan that is metered by requests and execution time. Our pay-as-you-go customers typically pay with a

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credit card on a monthly or annual basis for our Pro and Business subscription plans and on a monthly basis for our other pay-as-you-go plans and add-on products.

Key elements of our business model include:

•Significant investment in ongoing product development. We invest significantly in research and development. Our focus on research and development allows us to continually enhance the capabilities and functionality of our global network with new products and product features that are innovative and powerful and can be quickly adopted by our customers and helps us grow our customer base, which allows us to serve a greater portion of the world's Internet traffic. That in turn provides us with greater knowledge and insight into the challenges that Internet users face every day.

•Investments in our network for growth. We believe that the size, sophistication, and distributed nature of our global network provide us with a significant competitive advantage. We intend to continue to make substantial investments in our global network infrastructure to support the growth of our business, including the addition of servers with storage capabilities to support our storage and database products and servers with graphics processing units (GPUs) to support our AI-related developer platform products. As we invest in our network, we believe the service that we can provide our customers and the insight and knowledge that we can gain will continue to grow.

•Efficient go-to-market model. We have built an efficient go-to market model that reflects the flexibility and ease of use our products offer to our customers around the world. This has enabled us to acquire new customers as well as to expand within our existing customer base in a rapid, cost-effective manner. In particular, we have invested heavily in our contracted customer sales efforts.

◦New customer acquisition. We believe that anyone that relies on the Internet to deliver products, services, or content or to operate its business can be a Cloudflare customer. As such, we are focused on driving an increased number of customers onto our network and products to support our long-term growth. We continue to invest to build our direct sales force, increase brand awareness, leverage and expand channel partners, and improve the sophistication of our sales operations for contracted customers, particularly large customers. Additionally, through our pay-as-you-go offering, a customer can subscribe to one of our many plans and begin using our network quickly, with minimal technical skill and no professional services. This has allowed us to acquire a large portion of our paying customers very rapidly and at significantly lower customer acquisition costs than our other product offerings.

◦Expansion of our existing customers. We believe that our network enables a large opportunity for growth within our existing customer base given the breadth of products we offer on our infrastructure platform. Our relationships with customers often start with servicing a portion of their overall needs and expand over time as they realize the significant value we deliver. Once a customer has adopted one product on our network, it can easily add additional products. As we add more products and functionality to our network, we see opportunities to drive upsell as customers seek to consolidate onto one infrastructure platform to meet all of their security, performance, and reliability network requirements. We also intend to continue to invest in market awareness of our new products to improve growth within our existing customers.

◦International reach. Our global network, with a presence in more than 335 cities and over 125 countries worldwide, has helped to foster our strong international growth. International markets represented 49% and 51% of our revenue in the three months ended June 30, 2026 and 2025, respectively, and we intend to continue to invest in our international growth as a strategy to expand our customer base around the world.

•Free customer base. Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers are typically individual developers, early-stage startups, hobbyists, and other users and, like our pay-as-you-go customers, sign up for our service through our website. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paying customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a "virtual quality assurance" function that allows us to maintain a high

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rate of product innovation, while ensuring our products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to our paying customers.

Opportunities, Challenges, and Risks

We believe that the growth of our business and our future success are dependent upon many factors, including growing our paying customer base, particularly large customers, expanding our relationships with existing paying customers, developing and successfully launching new products and features, expanding into additional market segments, expanding our base of free customers, and developing and maintaining favorable peering and co-location relationships. Each of these factors presents significant opportunities for us, but also poses material challenges and risks that we must successfully address in order to grow our business and improve our operating results. We expect that addressing these challenges and risks will increase our operating expenses significantly over the next several years. The timing of our future profitability, if we achieve profitability at all, will depend upon many variables, including the success of our growth strategies and the timing and size of investments and expenditures that we choose to undertake, as well as market growth and other factors that are not within our control. In addition, we must comply with complex, uncertain, and evolving laws, rules, and regulatory requirements across federal, state, and international jurisdictions. If we fail to successfully address these challenges, risks, and variables, our business, operating results, financial condition, and prospects may be adversely affected.

Impact of Macroeconomic Developments

The United States government has implemented, or threatened to implement, tariffs on some or

[Excerpt truncated for page length; source filing is linked above.]

Item 7. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This section of this Form 10-K generally discusses 2025 and 2024 items and year-to-year comparisons between 2025 and 2024. Discussions of 2023 items and year-to-year comparisons between 2024 and 2023 are not included in this Form 10-K, and such disclosure can be found in “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Part II, Item 7 of the Company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024, which information is incorporated herein by reference. In addition to historical financial information, the following discussion contains forward-looking statements that are based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those factors discussed in the section titled “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year end is December 31.

Overview

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We have built a global network that delivers a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies—making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware. Our network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across their on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. In addition, the distributed and programmable nature of our network increasingly is resulting in our customers building their applications on top of our network, too — including both traditional applications and those that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).

Our Business Model

Our business model benefits from our ability to serve the needs of all customers ranging from individual developers to the largest enterprises, in a cost-effective manner. Our products generally are easy to deploy and allow for rapid and efficient onboarding of new customers and expansion of our relationships with our existing customers over time. Given the large customer base we have and the immense amount of Internet traffic that we manage, we are able to negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with Internet service providers (ISPs) that allow us to place our equipment directly in their data centers, which drives down our bandwidth and co-location expenses. This symbiotic relationship that we have with ISPs and the efficiency of our serverless network architecture allows us to introduce new products on our network at low marginal cost.

We generate revenue primarily from sales to our customers of subscriptions to access our network and products. We offer a variety of plans to our free and paying customers depending on their required features and functionality.

•Contracted customers. Our contracted customers, which consist of customers that enter into contracts for our Enterprise subscription plan, have contracts that typically range from one to three years and are typically billed on a monthly or annual basis. Our agreements with contracted customers are tailored and priced to meet their varying needs and requirements. Enterprise subscription plan agreements for our contracted customers generally include a base subscription and, in some cases, a portion based on variable usage. Agreements with certain of our larger enterprise customers may be structured as a "pool of funds" in which the customer commits to spend at least a specified amount on our products during the subscription period. These “pool of funds” arrangements do not require the customer to subscribe for specific products or spend any specific amounts during any month, quarter or, if applicable, year of the subscription period, but the funds must be utilized during the subscription period under the terms of these subscription agreements.

•Pay-as-you-go customers. For our pay-as-you-go customers, we offer the ability to purchase our products through our website. We make our pay-as-you-go product solutions available in several configurations. For customers securing and accelerating their Internet properties using our website and application services, we offer Pro and Business subscription plans through our website per registered domain, and it is common for customers to purchase subscriptions to cover multiple Internet properties (e.g., domains, websites, application programming interfaces (APIs), and mobile applications). Pay-as-you-go customers can subscribe to more than one solution and purchase add-on products and network functionality we offer to meet their more advanced needs. For pay-as-you-go or contracted customers who need a scalable Zero

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Trust security solution to secure users and internal resources using our Zero Trust and network services solutions, we make these products available on a per seat basis. In addition, for developers building serverless applications, we offer our developer solutions products to these customers on a usage-based plan that is metered by requests and execution time. Our pay-as-you-go customers typically pay with a credit card on a monthly or annual basis for our Pro and Business subscription plans and on a monthly basis for our other pay-as-you-go plans and add-on products.

Key elements of our business model include:

•Significant investment in ongoing product development. We invest significantly in research and development. Our focus on research and development allows us to continually enhance the capabilities and functionality of our global network with new products and product features that are innovative and powerful and can be quickly adopted by our customers and helps us grow our customer base, which allows us to serve a greater portion of the world's Internet traffic. That in turn provides us with greater knowledge and insight into the challenges that Internet users face every day.

•Investments in our network for growth. We believe that the size, sophistication, and distributed nature of our global network provide us with a significant competitive advantage. We intend to continue to make substantial investments in our global network infrastructure to support the growth of our business, including the addition of servers with storage capabilities to support our storage and database products and servers with graphics processing units (GPUs) to support our AI-related developer platform products. As we invest in our network, we believe the service that we can provide our customers and the insight and knowledge that we can gain will continue to grow.

•Efficient go-to-market model. We have built an efficient go-to market model that reflects the flexibility and ease of use our products offer to our customers around the world. This has enabled us to acquire new customers as well as to expand within our existing customer base in a rapid, cost-effective manner. In particular, we have invested heavily in our contracted customer sales efforts.

◦New customer acquisition. We believe that anyone that relies on the Internet to deliver products, services, or content or to operate its business can be a Cloudflare customer. As such, we are focused on driving an increased number of customers onto our network and products to support our long-term growth. We continue to invest to build our direct sales force, increase brand awareness, leverage and expand channel partners, and improve the sophistication of our sales operations for contracted customers, particularly large customers. Additionally, through our pay-as-you-go offering, a customer can subscribe to one of our many plans and begin using our network quickly, with minimal technical skill and no professional services. This has allowed us to acquire a large portion of our paying customers very rapidly and at significantly lower customer acquisition costs than our other product offerings.

◦Expansion of our existing customers. We believe that our network enables a large opportunity for growth within our existing customer base given the breadth of products we offer on our infrastructure platform. Our relationships with customers often start with servicing a portion of their overall needs and expand over time as they realize the significant value we deliver. Once a customer has adopted one product on our network, it can easily add additional products. As we add more products and functionality to our network, we see opportunities to drive upsell as customers seek to consolidate onto one infrastructure platform to meet all of their security, performance, and reliability network requirements. We also intend to continue to invest in market awareness of our new products to improve growth within our existing customers.

◦International reach. Our global network, with a presence in more than 330 cities and over 125 countries worldwide, has helped to foster our strong international growth. International markets represented 51%, 49%, and 48% of our revenue in the years ended December 31, 2025, 2024, and 2023, respectively, and we intend to continue to invest in our international growth as a strategy to expand our customer base around the world.

•Free customer base. Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers are typically individual developers, early-stage startups, hobbyists, and other users and, like our pay-as-you-go customers, sign up for our service through our website. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security,

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performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paying customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a "virtual quality assurance" function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring our products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to our paying customers.

Opportunities, Challenges, and Risks

We believe that the growth of our business and our future success are dependent upon many factors, including growing our paying customer base, particularly large customers, expanding our relationships with existing paying customers, developing and successfully launching new products and features, expanding into additional market segments, expanding our base of free customers, and developing and maintaining favorable peering and co-location relationships. Each of these factors presents significant opportunities for us, but also poses material challenges and risks that we must successfully address in order to grow our business and improve our operating results. We expect that addressing these challenges and risks will increase our operating expenses significantly over the next several years. The timing of our future profitability, if we achieve profitability at all, will depend upon many variables, including the success of our growth strategies and the timing and size of investments and expenditures that we choose to undertake, as well as market growth

[Excerpt truncated for page length; the complete text is on the linked full-MD&A page.]