A New Tier for Cloudflare’s Power Users

Cloudflare has announced the Cloudflare Developer Expert Program, a new initiative designed to recognize and support the developers who build most heavily on Workers, Pages, and the broader Cloudflare ecosystem. The program targets early adopters who provide regular product feedback, test new releases, and act as evangelists for Cloudflare’s developer tools.

Participants receive a set of benefits centered on direct access and influence:

  • Early access to features, including private betas
  • Admission to a private community of power users
  • Routine calls with product managers, engineers, and developer advocates
  • Sponsorships for open-source work
  • Cloudflare swag

Initial invitations have already been sent to a first batch of users. Developers can apply or nominate others via this form.

Why Cloudflare Formalized the Program

Cloudflare’s development cycle is intentionally fast, with a heavy emphasis on collecting feedback before features reach general availability. The Workers team saw strong results from this approach during beta testing of custom builds for Wrangler, the CLI tool. That release was significant because it introduced ES Modules syntax to Workers, expanding the range of compatible JavaScript packages and libraries.

To gather pre-release input, the team opened a private Discord channel to roughly 50 users. The feedback surfaced edge cases that hadn’t been addressed — such as support for Workers Unbound — and clarified which fixes should be prioritized before launch. It also highlighted concrete documentation improvements.

“The Workers team wanted our input early on for such a big release, and it really shows how seriously they’re taking developer experience,” said James Ross, CTO of Nodecraft.

The positive results led Cloudflare to make early user involvement a standard part of its workflow. The same private Discord model was applied to the development of running functions directly on Cloudflare Pages, one of the company’s larger releases of the year.

“We’re able to ship this feature more quickly and confidently because of feedback in our Discord,” said Nevi Shah, product manager for Cloudflare Pages. “Users let us know quickly what can be better and what features they need first.”

Developer Feedback Shapes the Platform

Since the first Developer Week in April, which saw the launch of Cloudflare Pages and the Durable Objects open beta, Cloudflare has collected extensive feedback through Discord and other channels. The takeaway: developers expect their code to run automatically on Cloudflare’s infrastructure for well-established products like Pages, but for newer technologies such as Durable Objects, they want more direct guidance to get started reliably.

Bringing users into the development process earlier has helped Cloudflare support more of these “happy paths” and accommodate developers who prefer to work in their own way.

“I started developing with Cloudflare Workers shortly after it was announced. Over that time, Cloudflare has only increased its emphasis on developer experience,” said David Barratt, staff software engineer at Drizly. “The Cloudflare Developer Expert Program has been a fantastic way to have a quick feedback loop between the developers who have a lot of experience using the platform and the developers building that platform.”

Applying for the Program

Cloudflare is seeking developers who deploy to production using Workers, Pages, and its other tools. Applications are reviewed based on experience with those products, and selected experts receive dedicated support from Cloudflare’s team. Interested developers can apply through the program’s application form.