The Ultimate Cloudflare Guide: what each piece costs and where it bites
Elia (@eliakuratli), who runs several products on Cloudflare, walks through the developer platform with what each piece costs, what the Workers Paid plan includes, and a short prevention list for the one risk he says can actually hurt: no hard spend cap.
- Products
- WorkersD1R2Durable ObjectsAI Gateway
- Source
- Author experience𝕏 article
- Author
- Elia (@eliakuratli)
Key points
- The author says static asset requests served by a Worker are free and uncounted, that Workers bill CPU time rather than wall-clock time so waiting on a slow API costs nothing, and that only code execution counts toward the 10 million included requests.
- He describes the Workers Paid plan as a $5/month minimum for the whole account, not per project, lists what it includes per month, and says usage past those amounts is billed per unit.
- Under “the one thing that can actually hurt you” he writes that there is no hard spend cap and that a loop writing to D1 bills every write. His ten-minute prevention list: set CPU limits per Worker, turn on billing alerts, review every write path before it ships, and put AI Gateway in front of model calls so a runaway agent is visible immediately.
- His “what it’s bad at” list includes D1’s 10 GB per database and one query at a time per database, no real Postgres (Hyperdrive accelerates yours), and long-running or CPU-heavy work needing Containers or Workflows instead of a Worker.
Original sources
Original source · Published
Read on 𝕏Elia
@eliakuratli · Original 𝕏 post
https://t.co/MO9Oqx79sO
Another author, François Altwies (@francois352), replies that cron jobs are not free and are billed by the microsecond, as far as he knows — questioning the article’s line that Cron Triggers are free.
Read on 𝕏François Altwies
@francois352 · Original 𝕏 post
@eliakuratli Nice but cron jobs are not free and billed my microseconds, AFAIK
The author replies to that comment asking whether they are free.
Read on 𝕏Elia
@eliakuratli · Original 𝕏 post
@francois352 They are free, no?
Another author, Filip (@aladicf), notes that the free Workers plan can get about 3 million Durable Object requests while the paid plan includes only 1 million, asks whether it should be 3 million plus extra pricing, and says duration pricing looks fine on a monthly basis.
Read on 𝕏Filip
@aladicf · Original 𝕏 post
something seems off with Durable Object pricing.. free worker plan can get like 3 mil requests while requests included within paid plan are only 1 mil? shouldnt it be 3 mil and then extra pricing? Duration pricing seems fine when you work it out on a monthly basis.. thats how workers pricing is 🧐🤷🏻♂️
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.
mcwangcn reports $1,300 in D1 charges after a bot attack.
@mcwangcn says D1 writes previously cost over a thousand dollars and separately mentions Workers CPU charges without giving an amount. He later shares a Cloudflare bill and says $1,300 of its $3,600 came from D1 after a bot attack.
A budget alert is a horn, not a brake
@GUYUE_LGY points to Cloudflare’s Budget alerts documentation: alerts send email when spend crosses a threshold but do not pause or cap usage. Before letting AI run unattended, the author checks what actually happens at the line.