Why Basis runs end-to-end on Cloudflare.

Conviction you can deploy

As an investor I'd been underwriting the same thesis for a long time: Cloudflare is an extremely innovative company that keeps compounding its platform: first security and performance, then compute, then storage, then AI. The part of the thesis you can't get from an earnings call is whether the developer platform is actually good enough to build a real business on. There's only one honest way to answer that: build something real on it, with no escape hatches.

So Basis has no other cloud. No VPC somewhere else, no database vendor on the side, no email service bolted on. If Cloudflare doesn't offer it, Basis doesn't use it.

What "the whole stack" actually means

The app ships as a single edge Worker: an Astro application compiled into one deployment that runs close to the user, everywhere, with no servers to size or regions to pick. Around that Worker, the platform covers a full product's needs:

• Hosting & DNS: the site, the API, and the domain itself all live on Cloudflare.
• Data: D1 for structured records, R2 for documents and audio, Vectorize for semantic search, Durable Objects for real-time collaboration.
• Pipelines: Queues and Workflows run the extraction and enrichment jobs that turn raw filings and transcripts into a knowledge graph.
• Email: Email Routing receives forwarded newsletters and turns them into research context, no mail server involved.
• AI: AI Gateway fronts our model calls with caching, logging, and cost control, and Workers AI hosts open-source models at a fraction of what the big closed APIs cost for the same job.

The AI Gateway deserves a special mention: having one accountable chokepoint for every model call, with observability built in, is the kind of thing you usually have to build yourself. And for the high-volume, low-glamour AI work (classification, scoring, embedding), low-cost open-source model hosting changes the economics entirely.

The developer experience that sold me

One CLI reaches everything. The same tool that deploys the Worker also queries the database, tails production logs, inspects the object store, and manages secrets. When one command line covers your entire infrastructure, the gap between "idea" and "shipped" collapses. Most improvements to Basis go from commit to production in under two minutes, deployed globally.

And because everything rides Cloudflare's network, the security and performance posture (TLS, DDoS protection, edge caching, requests served near the user) is the default, not a project.

The verdict

A year in, the bet has held. The platform handled everything a data-heavy, AI-heavy product asked of it, and the constraint of one platform turned out to be a feature: fewer moving parts, one bill, one mental model. I started this as a shareholder's proof of concept. I'd now make the same choice purely on the engineering merits.

Disclosure: I've been a Cloudflare shareholder for years, long before Basis. Consider that context, not advice.