Cloudflare Shows How Non-Profits Build AI Tools With $7.5 Million in Credits

From security to building new tools

Cloudflare's Project Galileo, which provides free cybersecurity services to civil society organizations, protects more than 3,400 domains across more than 120 countries, according to the company. Through these partnerships, Cloudflare says organizations have told it that their needs have changed: they no longer only want to secure existing applications, they want to build new ones.

The company points to a difficult moment for the sector. Many organizations report financial strain after major reductions in government funding contributed to layoffs and the closing of programs. Some groups have turned to AI to do more with less, but Cloudflare describes adoption as ad hoc.

A CIVICUS survey cited by Cloudflare found that more than half of civil society respondents viewed privacy concerns as a barrier to use. Among those surveyed, 48% cited financial constraints limiting their adoption. These groups often hold sensitive data, such as the location of activists or the identities of anonymous sources, and are disproportionately at risk of cyberattacks, according to Cloudflare's own data.

How Cloudflare says it addresses privacy and cost

Cloudflare argues its developer services build in security and privacy protections from the outset. Applications running on its global network are automatically protected from distributed denial-of-service attacks and attempts to gain unauthorized access to internal systems, the company says.

On cost, it highlights a lightweight, serverless architecture that scales with demand without requiring organizations to provision or pay for idle infrastructure. Workers AI removes the need to operate dedicated GPU infrastructure, while AI Gateway offers rate limits, observability into how teams use AI, and intelligent model routing to reduce unnecessary model calls.

During Birthday Week last year, Cloudflare expanded Cloudflare for Startups to include non-profit and public interest organizations, giving each up to $250,000 in credits for its developer services. It selected 30 organizations for its first non-profit cohort, working on problems in climate science, humanitarian aid, mental health, civic engagement and education.

What the cohort has built

LebTown, an independent non-profit newsroom covering Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, previously ran its operation across two Google Docs, a Google Calendar, Discord and Gmail. It is replacing that with a custom editorial management system that follows stories from pitch to publication, tracks audience reach, and lets reporters log community impact. The team also built tools that convert county real-estate transfer records from PDF exports into structured data, plus a real-time copyeditor agent that integrates with its WordPress site.

Kaya Guides built a WhatsApp-based mental health application that pairs people experiencing depression in India with trained lay counselors. As of September 2026, it has supported 10,439 people, with 2,325 currently enrolled. After migrating its care management system to Cloudflare, it processes around 500,000 WhatsApp messages a month. It also built a live AI system that listens to counseling calls and gives counselors real-time feedback. According to Kaya, the tools have helped make the program more consistent and self-correcting as it scales, without significant additional cost or complexity.

The Snorkelling Society, a UK non-profit, is building SnorkelMap, a web and mobile application for the global snorkeling community. Because volunteers maintain it, the group uses Cloudflare to secure storage for community contributions and uploaded images and to guard against cyberattacks.

Human rights projects with volunteer engineers

Larger organizations wanted complex workflows and extra engineering support. Their projects shared a problem: large amounts of manually collected, dispersed information that had to be integrated, reviewed and structured for analysis. The data was sensitive, including the names of human rights abuse victims, so unauthorized access, data leakage or hallucinations in outputs could have serious consequences.

Cloudflare says it provided free access to its developer services and assembled volunteer engineers, including product experts, front-end designers, back-end builders and security advisors. Questions it is exploring include where automation helps, which models fit each task, how to add security controls, and where a person must remain involved.

Freedom House, founded in 1941, maintains what Cloudflare calls the world's most comprehensive database of transnational repression incidents. Because identifying and coding thousands of potential cases by hand is labor intensive, Cloudflare is creating an interactive dashboard that can ingest, structure and flag potential cases from public reporting. The tool is fine-tuned on the organization's methodology, with Freedom House involved in every step, and security and data minimization are priorities.

The Global Network Initiative (GNI), a membership organization that includes Cloudflare, tracks regulatory and legal developments across dozens of jurisdictions. Cloudflare says it is building a dashboard that identifies such proposals and recommends opportunities for advocacy based on GNI's mission and previous work.

What it means for the sector

The examples suggest that credits, built-in security and hands-on engineering help can lower two barriers the CIVICUS survey identified: privacy concerns and cost. Cloudflare presents the projects as evidence of what becomes possible when AI applications are accessible, secure and affordable to build and run. The results described are the company's own account, and the human rights tools are still described as being built.