Cloudflare free plan from scratch: which services bill on overage, and what to set up first

Key points

• The author’s rule of thumb: on the Free plan, Workers, KV, D1, Workers AI and the Durable Objects available there return errors once the free quota is used up and reset the next morning at 08:00 Beijing time, with no charge; R2 needs its own subscription and bills overage monthly, and after upgrading to Workers Paid (from $5 a month) overage is billed by usage. Cloudflare’s current Workers limits page says the Free daily request limit resets at midnight UTC and further requests get error 1027 or fail open, and its Workers AI pricing page says Free accounts must upgrade to go past 10,000 Neurons a day.
• On R2 he notes that billing rounds up — Cloudflare’s own example counts 1,000,001 operations as 2 million and 1.1 GB as 2 GB — that the r2.dev development URL is rate-limited and cannot use cache, WAF rules or access control, so images should go through a custom domain, and that subscribing requires a valid payment method and may place a temporary preauthorization on the card. Cloudflare’s current R2 pricing page and billing policy page say the same about rounding up and payment methods.
• For sites deployed as Workers, he points out that static asset requests are free and unlimited, but paths routed through the Worker with run_worker_first return 429 once the free quota is exhausted instead of falling back to static files; and a Workers AI demo on a public workers.dev address spends quota on every visit, so turn off public access or delete the Worker after the demo, and consider putting AI Gateway in front to rate-limit calls. Cloudflare’s current static assets billing page confirms the run_worker_first 429 behavior.
• His pre-flight list: stay on the Free plan where possible; keep R2 to image hosting and backups with cache and WAF rules on the custom domain; after upgrading, first create a budget alert under Billing → Billable usage, remembering it only sends email, does not pause or cap usage, and is only for Pay-as-you-go accounts; give cron jobs, Durable Object alarms and queues a loop count limit, run them locally first and watch the usage page on launch day; on Workers Paid set a per-Worker CPU limit (default 30 seconds, up to 5 minutes, the official example uses 100 ms) and a subrequest limit; and delete Workers you no longer use. Cloudflare’s current budget alerts page, Workers limits page and Durable Objects pricing page (which counts alarm invocations as requests) support these points.
• He concludes that, for the services used in the article, there is no entry point for usage charges unless you subscribe to R2 or Workers Paid, and says his figures follow the October 2026 docs and may change.

Original sources

1. Published2026-10-12

   Original post

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   李天才 (@Lniosytest) re-walks a popular Cloudflare beginner tutorial (domains, email routing, R2, Workers AI) against the October 2026 docs, prompted by the $10,811 Durable Object alarm bill, and adds a table of what happens on overage plus a pre-flight list for avoiding a runaway bill.

   李天才｜TianCai

   @Lniosytest · Original 𝕏 post

   https://t.co/G9cRNeTsae

   2026-10-12 02:11:10 UTC