Fastly, Inc.
Moat Score — Fastly, Inc.
Total Moat Score
10 / 30
| Moat Factor | Score | Analysis |
|---|---|---|
| Intangible Assets Patents, trademarks, brand strength, or regulatory licenses that protect a company's products or services from being freely copied by competitors. | 2 / 5 | Fastly holds 112 issued or allowed U.S. patents and a technically differentiated WebAssembly-based Compute platform, but it itself concedes that larger rivals like Cloudflare and the hyperscalers have more mature IP portfolios, limiting this to a real but modest advantage. |
| Cost Advantage A durable ability to produce goods or services more cheaply than competitors — through scale, unique access to cheap inputs, location, or process — that lets a company undercut rivals or out-earn them at the same price. | 1 / 5 | Fastly explicitly competes against point CDNs on price and against hyperscalers and Cloudflare on infrastructure economics, and its own gross margin (57.1% GAAP in 2025) still trails better-capitalized competitors, leaving it without a genuine cost advantage. |
| Pricing Power The ability to raise prices without losing meaningful business, because the product or service is differentiated, mission-critical, or has few good substitutes. | 2 / 5 | Most customer contracts run about one year with no long-term financial commitments, and usage-based pricing means Fastly must continually re-earn spend; rising net retention (110%) shows some ability to expand pricing with existing accounts, but new/renewal pricing faces real competitive pressure. |
| Network Effect The product or service becomes more valuable to every user as more people or organizations use it, making an established leader harder to displace. | 1 / 5 | Fastly's edge network has limited network effects: a larger point-of-presence footprint improves performance for all customers somewhat, but unlike a true network business, one customer's traffic does not materially increase the value of the platform to another customer. |
| Switching Costs The money, time, or operational disruption a customer would face switching to a competitor, which locks in existing customers and supports renewals. | 3 / 5 | Once a customer has integrated Fastly's CDN, security (WAF, bot management), and Compute services into production infrastructure, re-architecting around a different edge provider is a meaningful engineering undertaking, reflected in the 110% net retention rate and growing top-customer revenue concentration. |
| Efficient Scale A market that can only profitably support a small number of players, so incumbents face limited threat from new entrants even without other defenses. | 1 / 5 | The edge cloud/CDN market comfortably supports multiple large players (Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud) alongside Fastly, and Fastly itself is the smaller, sub-scale competitor across nearly every category it operates in, so this market shows little sign of being too small to support rivals. |