Cloud Services Purchasing Shifts to AI Coding Agents

GoDaddy (GDDY) and DigitalOcean (DOCN) both said on their latest quarterly earnings calls, on October 29 and November 3, 2026, that AI coding agents are starting to choose and buy web services for developers: more new customers now have a coding assistant or AI agent handle sign-up, vendor selection and deployment, instead of comparing vendors themselves [1][2].

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Coding assistants now handle vendor selection

Putting a small website or app online usually means buying a domain, renting a server and setting up a database. A domain is the site's address, such as a name ending in .com. Developers used to search and compare prices, then open an account and pay at a registrar (a company that sells domains at retail to individuals and businesses, such as GoDaddy) or a cloud provider. Coding assistants and agent frameworks such as Codex and OpenClaw can now write the code from a one-line request and then finish those steps too. In August, DigitalOcean said it had integrated its cloud into coding and agent-building environments including OpenClaw, Codex, Hermes and GrokBuild, so a developer working there is one API call away from its services [3]. An API is the interface one piece of software uses to call another.

That moves the buying decision from a person to an agent. DigitalOcean CEO Paddy Srinivasan said that when an agent decides on its own where to build, it picks the cloud it can read, reason about and deploy to [2]. At that step, search ads and brand recognition matter less, and vendors with clear documentation, usable interfaces and low bundle prices are easier to pick. Any company selling standardized services at retail to developers and small businesses faces the same shift.

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Agent-originated customers have reached scale and brought price cuts

DigitalOcean gave the most concrete numbers: roughly half of the unique visitors to DigitalOcean.com are agents, and more than 37,000 unique customers have deployed on its platform through an agent this year [2]. Management said agents are now direct customers of DigitalOcean: besides running on its cloud, they increasingly select it, sign into it and deploy on it [2].

GoDaddy described the other side of the same change. CEO Aman Bhutani said new cohorts increasingly start inside coding assistants, command line tools and agent interfaces, and buy differently. As that demand grows, the industry is discounting domains more sharply and offering freemium hosting [1]. He said traffic from large language models jumped last quarter, though from a small base, and that most adoption of GoDaddy's developer platform still comes from the web, with only a small percentage coming through APIs [1]. One company sells cloud computing and the other sells domains and website tools, but both describe agents making purchase decisions for people. DigitalOcean can already quantify it; GoDaddy is still working to get chosen by agents.

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Registries collect volume while retailers give up price

When the customer entry point moves from search and ads into coding tools, retailers and the upstream registry are affected in different directions. Registrars cut prices to win these new customers, which lowers retail revenue per domain. GoDaddy said it is working to make its new bundles show up favorably in large language models and AI agents [1]. VeriSign (VRSN), the registry for .com and .net, charges a fixed fee per registration, and retail discounts do not change that fee. VeriSign's third-quarter 10-Q shows 13.1 million new .com and .net registrations, versus 10.6 million a year earlier, and the company credits part of the demand to AI website-creation tools and registrars' focus on customer acquisition [4]. A year ago, it listed AI among the alternatives that could limit demand for domain names [5].

The conclusion has two limits for now. DigitalOcean does not break out revenue by customer origin, so the gain from agents is still management's attribution. GoDaddy's Core Platform grew only 4% in the third quarter [1], and there is no data yet on whether customers won with discounts will renew. If cheap first-year registrations renew poorly, VeriSign's added volume could fade. The next things to check are whether DigitalOcean discloses retention and revenue for agent-originated customers, and how these discounted registrations renew when they come due.

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Companies that may be affected

• VeriSign (VRSN): Operates the .com and .net registry and charges a fixed fee per registration. Registrar discounting aimed at agent-originated customers could lift its registration volume, but whether that volume lasts depends on how discounted first-year registrations renew.
• MongoDB (MDB): A database software company that launched a managed MCP server (an interface that lets agents call outside tools) for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and says coding agents drive most referral traffic to its Voyage product [6]. If agents also pick databases for developers, it sits at the same selection step.
• Wix (WIX): A website-building platform whose Base44 product lets users create apps in natural language, serving exactly the new customers who start inside agent interfaces. But Wix also said some partners are shifting activity from Wix to Base44 [7], so the effect is mixed.

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Sources

[1] Drillr · GoDaddy (GDDY) · 2026-10-29 · Earnings call

New cohorts are increasingly starting inside coding assistants, command line tools, and agent interfaces, and they buy differently. As this new demand grows, we are also seeing sharper discounting across the industry on products like domains, along with freemium offers on hosting.

[2] Drillr · DigitalOcean (DOCN) · 2026-11-03 · Earnings call

[3] Drillr · DigitalOcean (DOCN) · 2026-08-04 · Earnings call

[4] Drillr · VeriSign (VRSN) · 2026-10-22 · Form 10-Q

[5] Drillr · VeriSign (VRSN) · 2025-10-23 · Form 10-Q

[6] Drillr · MongoDB (MDB) · 2026-09-01 · Earnings call

[7] Drillr · Wix (WIX) · 2026-08-04 · Earnings call

This article only helps surface industry changes and companies that may be overlooked. It is not a stock recommendation.