It's nowhere near as much as you think it is. We think of the internet as one big flat network, but it's actually a conglomerate of separate networks (intercon

It's nowhere near as much as you think it is. We think of the internet as one big flat network, but it's actually a conglomerate of separate networks (interconnected by peering and transit agreements). There are a finite number of networks on the internet. Of those, only some are good CDN locations as you don't need a CDN node on every single network. The number of places where you could possibly ever want a CDN location is finite, with three or four digits. Cloudflare has a presence in 335 cities - a lot, but not an impossible lot. We're not talking about ten million. Ten million dollars, maybe. (Ten million dollars would be $30k per city - respectable) How many of Cloudflare's customers even care about all 335 cities? If you're a European business with European customers, you only care about the ~10 mainstream internet exchange sites in Europe (e.g. Frankfurt, London). Cloudflare has 59, but I don't think they need 59. If you want to be a Cloudflare competitor and support European businesses, you only need ~10 physical locations. That's an extremely manageable number. What you want is at least one peering connection to every major European network, and ideally, a hotline to their NOC or a detailed BGP community agreement, to block attack traffic as close to the source as possible. I should point out that due to the ongoing collapse of US hegemony, a lot of European institutions would like to reduce their dependence on Cloudflare right now.