Free plan FAQ: overage errors, reset time and CPU limits
风易 (@Michael_liyang) answers three common questions: whether going over the free quota silently charges you, when quotas reset, and whether the free plan can be used commercially.
- Products
- Workers
- Source
- Author experience𝕏
- Author
- 风易 (@Michael_liyang)
Key points
- The author says going over the free quota does not silently charge you as long as no card is added: on the free plan without a card, overage returns an error, which he calls the hardest circuit breaker and more reliable than any usage alert. With a card added, he says, it becomes pay-as-you-go.
- He says quotas reset at 00:00 UTC (08:00 Beijing time). He adds that a single Workers invocation has a 10 ms CPU limit, but time spent waiting for an API response is not CPU time, so slow APIs do not eat the quota; the request count does.
- On commercial use, he says Cloudflare’s free plan can be used commercially, and contrasts this with Vercel Hobby, which he says explicitly forbids commercial use.
Original sources
Original source · Published
Read on 𝕏风易 | AI 工具链
@Michael_liyang · Original 𝕏 post
这半个月被问最多的三个问题，今天一次说清。 Q1：免费额度用超了，会悄悄扣我钱吗？ 不会 —— 前提是你不绑卡。Cloudflare 免费计划在不绑卡的情况下，超额直接返回报错，这是最硬的熔断，比任何用量告警都可靠。绑了卡才是随用随付。 Q2：额度到底什么时候重置？ UTC 0 点，换成北京时间是早上 8 点。 另外 Workers 单次 CPU 上限是 10 毫秒，但「等接口返回」的时间不算 CPU —— 所以慢接口不会吃掉你的额度，吃额度的是请求数。 Q3：这套免费方案能商用吗？ 要分开看。Cloudflare 的免费计划可以商用；Vercel 的 Hobby 版明确写了不允许商用，要商用得升 Pro，20 美元一个人一个月。 这一条最容易在项目上线那天才发现。 我是风易，只发我自己跑通过的方案。
More to read
Introducing on-demand profiling: Cloudflare production examples
Dominik Picheta introduces on-demand CPU and memory profiling for Workers and Durable Objects, sharing Cloudflare examples of removing duplicate work and unnecessary allocation paths.
shmily7: a Durable Object alarm loop and a reported US$10,811.41 bill.
@shmily7 reports a Durable Object alarm loop in an unused test project, then says he paid the full US$10,811.41 bill to avoid service suspension. Cloudflare’s Ashley Peacock publicly says he is looking into it internally and will follow up. Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht later replies that he escalated it too. On October 9 the author declares the case closed: he reports that, with Ashley Peacock’s help, Cloudflare decided to refund the charges incurred during the bug in full, with the money still to arrive, and posts the support ticket reply he received.
Cloudflare Medivh: a self-hosted near-real-time bill estimator
An open-source, self-hosted monitor that adds today’s estimated usage cost to Cloudflare’s daily-updated billable usage, sends summaries, and calls a webhook when the current cycle crosses a budget.