Source-linked reports: Amounts and outcomes come from the original reports and linked replies.
babynarc: a Durable Objects alarm loop and a surprise bill that grew from $300 to $500.
@babynarc says an alarm loop in an old Durable Object he thought was inactive left him badly burned: he watched a surprise $300 bill grow to $500 even after killing it. Replying to Cloudflare's Dane Knecht and Kenton Varda, he suggests prepending budget-alert details to every `cf` result by default.
What happened
- Reported cause
- Unbounded loop
- Incident date
- Date not recorded
- First reported
- 2026-10-09 23:13 UTC
- Billing outcome
- Not recorded
- Case progress
- Not established
- Public Cloudflare reply
- Not linked
Original sources
Each entry links to the report or reply it describes.
Case timeline
Surprise bill grows from $300 to $500
Read on 𝕏Replying to @dok2001 and @KentonVarda, the author says an alarm loop in an old Durable Object he thought was inactive burned him badly, and that a surprise $300 bill inflated to $500 even after he killed it. He pitches showing budget-alert details at the top of every `cf` result by default.
a self-obsessed baby
@babynarc · Original 𝕏 post
I just got burned *badly* by Durable Objects — an alarm loop in an old object I thought was inactive. Watched a surprise $300 bill inflate to $500 even after killing it. Can I pitch you on a free QoL boost? Have budget alert details prepended to every `cf` result by default.
More to read
How I keep Cloudflare under $5: where surprise bills come from
Ashish Sharma (@sarmaasis) runs several sites on the $5 Workers Paid plan and lists, product by product, the usage patterns he says quietly run up a Cloudflare bill, ending with a 12-item checklist.
RetainDB: a reported $36k bill from a queue loop with 81 users.
Reddit user alameenswe, building RetainDB on Workers, KV, Durable Objects and Queues, reports a Cloudflare bill of about $36k for one month with 81 users; the post body says $35,000. He attributes it to a queue consumer that re-queued async writes, 12 unbatched Durable Object writes per memory write and a kv.list() authentication fallback.
Why hard spending caps take time: Ashley Peacock on billing latency
Ashley Peacock (@ashleypeacock), who works on Durable Objects at Cloudflare, explains from experience why near-real-time spending caps are hard to build, says hard billing caps are coming soon, and suggests budget alerts plus issue alerts in the meantime.