Cloudflare Formalizes Giving Back With Pledge 1% Membership

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%, the corporate philanthropy movement founded in 2014 that now counts more than 12,000 companies across 100 countries as members. The company will commit 1% of its products and 1% of its team's time to charitable causes, aligning with Pledge 1%'s framework that lets companies donate any combination of products, profits, time, or equity.

The announcement comes as Cloudflare prepares for its first Impact Week, an effort the company says is part of a broader push to "level up" both its business operations and its community engagement. While giving back has been part of Cloudflare's history since its founding — through programs like free DDoS mitigation, Universal SSL, and annual Birthday Week gifts — the Pledge 1% membership formalizes and expands that work.

Expanding Donated Product Programs

Cloudflare's 1% product commitment means growing its existing portfolio of donated services. The company's track record in this area includes three longstanding initiatives:

  • Project Galileo, launched in 2014, provides free security and reliability services to journalists, human rights activists, and other at-risk public interest organizations. The program currently protects over 1,500 organizations in 111 countries, representing more than $8 million in donated services.
  • The Athenian Project, created after the 2016 US election, offers state and local governments free access to Cloudflare's highest-tier security and reliability services to protect election and voter registration websites. It now serves 292 government entities across 30 states, and Cloudflare just announced the program is expanding internationally.
  • Project Pangea, announced this week, provides free connectivity to community networks serving underserved populations, including those in rural and developing areas.

Cloudflare sees these programs as early steps in leveraging its global network infrastructure — one of the fastest, most secure, and most reliable available — to help underserved communities gain safe online access.

New Volunteer Time Commitment

The more significant change is the new 1% time pledge. To meet that goal, Cloudflare will offer all employees three additional days of annual leave specifically for volunteering in their communities. The company estimates this will translate to roughly 70,000 hours of staff time dedicated to volunteer efforts next year.

Volunteering has precedent at Cloudflare. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the company's "Cloudflare Cares" program dedicated a full week each year to local volunteer work, with teams across major offices spending each day of that week at employee-selected local nonprofits. The program shifted to virtual during the pandemic, but Cloudflare says it looks forward to resuming in-person volunteering while keeping virtual options available.

The company believes the expanded time commitment will strengthen team cohesion, deepen ties between its offices and their surrounding communities, and help attract employees who value active civic engagement. While the initiative represents a significant investment of staff time, Cloudflare frames it as integral to its broader mission of helping build a better Internet.

With the Pledge 1% framework in place, Cloudflare says it now has a consistent, intentional structure for living up to its stated values — both through products that give back and through the teams that build them.