Hacker News

farhadhf
Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents blog.cloudflare.com

Hackbraten3 hours ago

Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.

Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.

jwr3 hours ago

I had similar thoughts: "let's convince everyone to outsource the decision on who can access their websites to us, because BOTS BOTS BOTS" and "let's make life easier for bots to do things".

moritzruth3 hours ago

First you spread the disease, then you sell the cure.

deadbabean hour ago

I think this is more of a “keep friends close but enemies closer” type thing.

throw123456789142 minutes ago

Sounds more like “let’s make money twice”.

isodev2 hours ago

But think of the shareholders

deadbabe2 hours ago

Anyone can be a shareholder.

horacemorace2 hours ago

Said the rich swe, fully oblivious of many who struggle to feed their own children.

copperxan hour ago

I thought there were no rich swes anymore?

deadbabean hour ago

Cloudflare is in the S&P500. If you have a 401k diversified in broad market indexes then most likely… you are a shareholder.

Denzel37 minutes ago

About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.

tough19 minutes ago

and sitll the US seems to be one of the biggest markets educated on "being a shareholder" im sure Europe has smaller percentage of them.

georgemcbay10 minutes ago

> About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all.

...and the top 10% by wealth own 90% of the stock market.

So even among the half that do have retirement savings in 401ks and the like it is on average very little compared to how much the truly wealthy have invested.

skinfaxian hour ago

That's unnecessarily presumptuous.

j45an hour ago

It's a clean way to charge AI to read content too.

simonw35 minutes ago

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps.

I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s.

The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#...

sofixa9 minutes ago

Never going to happen at such a platform.

They prefer waiving the occasional DDoS / misconfiguration over giving their customers to cause outages with something so trivially forgotten about and so disconnected from the tech and actual platform.

simonw2 hours ago

Hot damn...

> Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.

Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.

This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.

I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.

simonw2 hours ago

I just tried this out:

  % npx wrangler deploy --temporary
  
    wrangler 4.103.0
  ────────────────────
   You must accept Cloudflare's Terms of Service (https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/) and Privacy Policy (https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/) in order to continue. By typing "yes", you agree to these terms. Type "yes" to continue. … yes
  Solving proof-of-work challenge…
  Temporary account ready:
   Account: Educated Celery (created)
   Claim within: 60 minutes
   Claim URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/claim-preview?claimToken=CAVe7LzWiGad-redacted
  Total Upload: 13.79 KiB / gzip: 4.12 KiB
  Uploaded cloudflare-redirect-resolver (2.27 sec)
  Deployed cloudflare-redirect-resolver triggers (0.50 sec)
    https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers.dev
  Current Version ID: 5c12da7f-2749-4ccc-a8f6-79b85da98d10
I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am, but it did work - https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers... will be live for the next 59 minutes.

bstsban hour ago

> I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am

as far as i’m aware, that’s fully binding and often an accepted practise - take Minecraft’s server software, where you must accept the EULA with a text flag before running

avipars2 hours ago

You might want to claim the link or remove it

simonwan hour ago

I redacted it, but if anyone still has at and wants to steal my demo app they're welcome to it.

xyzzy_plughan hour ago

Why?

throw123456789140 minutes ago

Why not

aleksiy123an hour ago

Wasn’t this case pretty much before?

The limits are 100 workers on free and 500 on paid.

And if need more then you can always go their platform which supports tenancy.

As long as you have a cronjob or similar to clean up the cost of having per PR preview is pretty much zero.

tough17 minutes ago

unless you have 500 PR's a day =)

On the other hand, we already use regular CF builds for frontend previews, but that doesnt solve a fullstack PR preview much

aplomb1026an hour ago

[flagged]

mahirsaid12 minutes ago

This falls Within my predictions of how the AI playing field is become more leveled, in terms with human digital activity. Soon it wouldn't be so what you can do with the computer but what the agent can do BETTER. We are already there for the most part. These are the early steps of full re-genitive self hosting, fully capable AI the is far more advanced then asking it to solve a 2 + 2 question.

The article worded it perfectly; friction-less "efforts"

derektank3 hours ago

Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content. From elsewhere in their documentation, “Cloudflare limits how quickly you can create temporary preview accounts. If the Wrangler CLI cannot create an account because too many temporary preview accounts were requested too quickly, wait before retrying or authenticate the CLI with a permanent Cloudflare account,” and “Cloudflare applies additional abuse prevention checks to temporary preview accounts.”[1] This is a bit vague though. Creating a new account has never been a huge hurdle to overcome but this seems to reduce the barrier to entry even more.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/claim-dep...

gwittel18 minutes ago

Given how little they do now to stop malicious content hosted behind/by Cloudflare, the bare minimum if anything.

rdtsc3 hours ago

> Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content

If it helps laugh DDoS attacks they would be incentivized to do the exact opposite. They can charge more for “protection” then.

piterrroan hour ago

Lets keep in mind this is cloudflare workers runtime - it only makes sense to deploy small things there, maybe static sites. Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch, asking it to „now deploy to cloudflare” will fail so bad.

This would only work if they would provision docker image deployment, similar to google cloud run, but the still, everything serveless has its own caveats…

simonw33 minutes ago

> Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch

The latest models appear to know CF Workers inside out and are very capable of doing that if you ask them to.

Here's my GPT-5.5 xhigh + Codex Desktop transcript building one just now: https://gist.github.com/simonw/264bd6b8a39fc34c91c9c867454c6... - code here: https://github.com/simonw/cloudflare-redirect-resolver

kentonv36 minutes ago

> it only makes sense to deploy small things there

What makes you say that?

jsyang002 hours ago

> Make snail-game in Cloudflare Worker in TypeScript and deploy it using wrangler, don't ask me questions, do the best you can

https://snail-game.solstice-barometer.workers.dev/

pretty cool.

anilgulecha4 hours ago

If eastdakota/jgc are here.

- simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.

- You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store). These aren't considered "lockin".

- workers is "lockin" - not similar enough to lambda/cloud functions and so becomes CF specific.

Not having a simple container based compute piece has made me hesitate in taking up CF. (Fly or firebase won out)

jgrahamc2 hours ago

I am here but I retired from being CTO of Cloudflare in March 2025 [1] and the current CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have?

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...

htrp2 hours ago

quick piece of feedback, the workers architecture is a little bit annoying when converting from Lambda but hooking up to cloudflare MCP solves 90% of the issues

tailscaler2026an hour ago

there's absolutely nothing positive we want to encourage copying from AWS's architectural approach to anything.

tough14 minutes ago

chuckles

unix136 minutes ago

> simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.

I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean. Do you have specific use cases in mind outside of the worker invocation model? If so, I'm curious what you'd want to run on Cloudflare. Otherwise, workers don't have to be much of a "lockin" if treated as a thin layer, more like configuration.

> You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store).

Instead, if you mean accessing these resources from containers, it's a bit clunky [0] but it's there - you should be able to access worker bindings from containers through those outbound handlers.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/platform-detail...

sofixa7 minutes ago

Not the OP, but for me it's a simple matter of not wanting to use typescript and the whole swamp on fire that is NPM.

yodon3 hours ago

>Not having a simple container based compute piece made me hesitate in taking up CF

Agreed. I wish CF had something like Azure's new fast-starting Express containers.

ndjdjxixjenej3 hours ago

[dead]

conception3 hours ago

I know no one is writing copy anymore but i wish they tried to edit it a bit so it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. It just sours the product when it seems like so little effort was put into the message. And it’s not even hard - just change the prompt used!

ndjdjxixjenej3 hours ago

[dead]

aniviacat3 hours ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to merge the temporary account into an existing one, instead of claiming it as a new account?

This could lead to people having a large amount of separate accounts.

kylecazar3 hours ago

I assumed that's how it works if you sign in before claiming the account?

It says to claim you can either sign up or sign in.

827a3 hours ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.

quinncom2 hours ago

If I want to onboard a client to Cloudflare, I have to ask them to create an account and then invite me, which is a lot of friction for non-technical people.

A “create account” button accessible to me would be so much better. Then, I create the account and invite the client to join as owner.

frogpersonan hour ago

Cloudflare makes it really hard to spend money. I constantly have to talk to someone in sales to enable some feature after rounds of negotiating on price. I think they would have way more customers, spending much more money, if they just offered transparent pricing, and fully on-demand services.

variety86753 hours ago

soared3 hours ago

I’m going to need a wrapper for all these services offering this service.

truvem3 hours ago

[flagged]

chinallm_ai3 hours ago

[dead]

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