Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on November 5 that charging AI agents for what they take from websites could one day be its biggest business: “if you look 10 years out, I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare’s business”, according to the call transcript.
Cloudflare reported third-quarter revenue of $782.5 million, up 39% year over year, in its November 5 release, and guided fourth-quarter revenue of $845.0 million to $846.0 million. By our arithmetic, the midpoint is 8.1% above the third quarter.
Business Pill · AI Agents Explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on what AI agents are and how they work. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Cloudflare.
The key insight: On Cloudflare’s 5 November earnings call, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said that charging AI agents could become the largest part of the business if you look 10 years out. He described two paths: crawl efficiency that OpenAI already pays for, and future micropayments made when an agent visits a page. Cloudflare reported third-quarter revenue of $782.5 million, up 39%, and guided fourth-quarter revenue 8.1% higher at the midpoint, by our arithmetic.
Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges asked when Cloudflare’s next-generation business model for the internet could be “monetized in real dollar amounts”. Prince answered with an example. An agent asked to pick a restaurant in Manhattan “might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants’ websites, pull down 1,000 different menus”.
Prince said 999 of those restaurants bear a cost “but they are not getting any benefit”. He added that “a human might look at two or three things, but in this case, the scale is so high that we are going to have to figure out some additional way to pay for it”.
The two ways Matthew Prince said Cloudflare can charge for agent traffic on the 5 Nov 2026 earnings call, and Cloudflare’s quarterly revenue: $782.5 million reported for Q3 2026 and the $845.0-846.0 million Q4 guidance (midpoint shown). Data: Cloudflare release and call transcript. The 8.1% step-up is our arithmetic.
What Was Posted on X
Cloudflare CEO on AI agent monetization: “If you look 10 years out, I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare’s business”
Matthew Prince was asked when his next-generation business model for the internet will start bringing in real dollars. He explains:
“A way of thinking of it is, I’m sitting in Manhattan, and if I ask my agent, where am I going to go for dinner tonight after I’m done with earnings calls and callbacks? It might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants’ websites, pull down 1,000 different menus, and then I might choose to only go to one of those. The problem is that 999 of those restaurants have now had a cost that’s been applied to them, but they’re not getting any benefit. And that was always true of the internet, but the scale was different. A human might look at two or three things, but in this case, the scale is so high that we’re going to have to figure out some additional way to pay for it.”
“And so I think the ways of doing that are twofold. So one, where we’re already recognizing revenue and recognizing significant amounts of revenue is how do we make that more efficient? So we talked last quarter about how we partnered with OpenAI to make sure that they searched the internet. They didn’t do it in the kind of dumb way of just crawling everything all the time over and over again. But instead, Cloudflare could actually give them hints when a page had changed, when a menu price had updated, when anything had happened. And then they could get the freshest data, and they could actually crawl it. That helps OpenAI save money. And that actually helps Cloudflare’s customers get the freshest data to them and make sure that it doesn’t waste a ton of resources. And so I think that’s a clear way where we’re already seeing that, and that’s helped. OpenAI is paying for that, and a lot of other companies in the space I think you’ll see do that as well.”
“Beyond that, though, I think that we’re going to see some version of micropayments that exist where small payments get made when an agent comes. And I think it will be in exchange for, the more that an agent is willing to tell you about why it’s there, the more that you may be willing to charge it less to access the page. So if you imagine that an agent comes to a travel site and says, hey, I’m looking for a vacation for my user and his or her family. It’s family of four. They want to go to Hawaii. What do you have for me? That actually then might be something where you let the agent on for free. But it opens up all kinds of opportunities for advertising.”
“And, again, I think Cloudflare is in the perfect position to help bring both of those things together, both the agent and the places that might have whatever the agent is looking for. And so, like, that is coming. I don’t know exactly how long it will be before it turns into major sources of revenue. But if you look out in the more distant horizon, if you look 10 years out, I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare’s business.”
Fireside Alpha’s post at 14:47 UTC on 8 November quoting Prince’s answer on the 5 November call, including ‘if you look 10 years out, I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare’s business’. The post’s transcription differs slightly in wording from the call transcript we quote.
$NET Matthew Prince reveals running every knowledge worker’s agent in containers would need 40x the world’s CPUs
” Really the whole hyperscale world and all of the mobile world is built on this idea of containers.”
“The problem with containers is, if you imagine every single knowledge worker on earth has one agent that’s running for them, which seems, I mean, pretty conservative, I think most knowledge workers are going more than one agent, and you imagine those agents are all running in containers.”
“The problem with containers is you have to import a whole operating system and tool chain, all this stuff, just to power that.”
“Not even looking at GPUs, just looking at CPUs, you need 40x the number of CPUs that are produced in the world in order to just run the agents for those knowledge workers, which is, like, that’s not going to work.”
Fireside Alpha’s post from 12 September with an earlier clip in which Prince says running every knowledge worker’s agent in containers would need 40x the number of CPUs produced in the world. It predates the earnings call.
Two Ways to Charge
The first, Prince said, is where Cloudflare is “already recognizing revenue, and recognizing significant amounts of revenue”: giving crawlers hints when a page has changed, so they do not re-crawl everything. He cited the partnership with OpenAI described the previous quarter and said “OpenAI is paying for that”.
The second is payment per visit. Prince said: “we are going to see some version of micropayments that exist where small payments get made when an agent comes”. He said agents that explain why they are on a page might be charged less, and that letting some agents in for free “opens up all kinds of opportunities for advertising”.
He also said: “I don’t know exactly how long it will be before it turns into major sources of revenue”.
Isolates, Not Containers
In prepared remarks on the same call, Prince said: “I predicted last quarter that within five years, agents would outnumber humans online 1,000 to 1”, and that a quarter later he would “take the under on the timing of that bet”.
He said “The container-based architecture of the hyperscalers and neoclouds just can’t keep up in a cost-effective way with the new agentic paradigms of today” and that Cloudflare builds on isolates, calling the company “the first agentic cloud”.
In a clip that the account Fireside Alpha posted on September 12, Prince said that if every knowledge worker had one agent running in containers, “you need 40x the number of CPUs that are produced in the world in order to just run the agents for those knowledge workers”.
As we read the call, Prince put Cloudflare between the companies that build agents and the sites agents visit, and said it already earns from the first group.
As we read it, the restaurant example frames agent traffic as a cost borne by the sites that are visited but not chosen, which is the gap micropayments would try to close.
As we read the prepared remarks, the isolates-versus-containers argument is Cloudflare’s case that it can run agent workloads more cheaply than hyperscalers and neoclouds; Cloudflare gave no cost comparison in the excerpts we read.
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO, on the Q3 2026 call
“if you look 10 years out, I would imagine that this becomes the largest part of Cloudflare’s business”
Three Implications
FOR WEBSITE OWNERS Prince said 999 of 1,000 restaurants visited by an agent bear a cost but are not getting any benefit, and that some version of micropayments is coming.
FOR AI LABS Prince said OpenAI is paying for crawl hints that tell it when a page has changed, and that other companies in the space would do the same.
FOR CLOUDFLARE INVESTORS Prince said he does not know how long it will be before agent payments turn into major sources of revenue; the company reported $782.5 million of third-quarter revenue.
The essay says: “Inference is a revenue engine: continuous, distributed across millions of applications and agents, incurring marginal cost with every query.”
As we read it, Prince’s restaurant example describes who carries that marginal cost when an agent reads 1,000 pages to use one. The essay does not discuss Cloudflare.
What Is Not Established
Cloudflare did not give a dollar figure for agent-related revenue in the call excerpts or the release we read, and Prince did not give a date. The 10-year horizon is Prince’s own estimate. The 40x CPU figure is from a September clip, not from the earnings call.
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On November 5, Prince said that charging AI agents could become “the largest part of Cloudflare’s business” in 10 years, through crawl efficiency that “OpenAI is paying for” today and through future micropayments. Cloudflare’s third-quarter revenue was $782.5 million, up 39%, and its fourth-quarter guidance midpoint is 8.1% higher by our arithmetic.
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A note on sourcing. Prince’s remarks are quoted from The Motley Fool’s transcript of Cloudflare’s third-quarter call on 5 November 2026; Fireside Alpha’s 8 November post carries the same answer in a slightly different transcription. Revenue and guidance are from Cloudflare’s 5 November release. The 40x CPU remark is from a clip Fireside Alpha posted on 12 September 2026. The 8.1% figure is our arithmetic. We did not contact Cloudflare.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
