Cloudflare Workers Pricing: Worker Cost, KV and Free Tier

Cloudflare Workers is one of the cheaper ways to run code, right up until it is not. The headline is a $5 a month paid plan with 10 million requests included, which reads as excellent value next to any server. The lines that actually catch people are Workers KV writes at $5 per million and Durable Objects duration at $12.50 per million GB-seconds, neither of which is obvious from the plan price.

Every figure below was read off Cloudflare's own pricing documentation on 2 September 2026. Where Cloudflare does not publish a rate, this article says so instead of estimating.

How much does Cloudflare Workers cost?

Cloudflare Workers costs $0 on the free plan and $5 a month minimum on the paid plan. The paid plan includes 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds a month. Above that you pay $0.30 per additional million requests and $0.02 per additional million CPU milliseconds.

The $5 is a minimum rather than a flat fee, so it is the floor of a usage bill rather than a subscription that covers everything. For a large share of real projects the included allowances are never exceeded and the bill genuinely is $5. The variance comes from the storage products rather than from compute.

What are the Cloudflare Workers free tier limits?

The free plan gives you 100,000 requests a day and 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation, with no charge for duration. That is a real free tier rather than a trial, and 100,000 requests a day is around 3 million a month, which is more than many production sites serve.

The binding limit on the free plan is almost never the request count. It is the 10 milliseconds of CPU time. Ten milliseconds is enough to rewrite headers, run a redirect, check a token or proxy a request. It is not enough to parse a large HTML document, run a template engine over a big dataset, or do anything cryptographic in a loop. Workers measures CPU time rather than wall-clock time, so waiting on a slow upstream API does not count against it, which is more generous than it first appears.

On the paid plan that ceiling rises to 30 seconds by default and can be configured up to 5 minutes.

How much does Workers KV cost?

Workers KV is free up to 100,000 reads a day and 1,000 writes a day, then $0.50 per million reads and $5.00 per million writes. Deletes and list operations are also $5.00 per million. Storage is $0.50 per GB-month after the first free gigabyte.

The ten to one gap between read and write pricing is the whole story of a KV bill. Reads are cheap because KV is built to be read from the edge constantly. Writes are expensive because each one has to propagate globally. A cache that is read a million times and written a thousand times costs about 50 cents. The same cache written a million times costs $5, ten times more, for the same number of operations.

The free plan's 1,000 writes a day is the limit most projects hit first. Any pattern that writes on request, such as a hit counter, a session store or a rate limiter keyed per user, will exhaust it before lunchtime.

How much do Durable Objects cost?

Durable Objects bill $0.15 per million requests above the included million a month, plus $12.50 per million GB-seconds of duration above an included 400,000 GB-seconds. Both meters are on the paid plan.

Duration is the meter to watch. A Durable Object bills for the time it is alive, not just the time it is handling a request, so an object that stays resident to hold a websocket or coordinate state accrues GB-seconds while doing nothing. That is the correct behaviour for what Durable Objects are for, but it prices very differently from the stateless request model of a plain Worker.

Three worked Cloudflare Workers bills

Rates on their own are hard to reason about, so here are three realistic shapes with the arithmetic shown.

Notice the shape of the third bill. Compute is entirely free, inside the included allowance, and the whole invoice is one meter: KV writes. That is the pattern to check for before assuming Workers is the cheap option. If your application writes on most requests, Workers is priced against you.

When is a plain server cheaper than Workers?

A server wins when your workload is write-heavy, CPU-heavy, or needs a real database. Workers wins when it is read-heavy, globally distributed and cheap per invocation. The crossover is not about traffic volume, it is about the shape of the work.

Write-heavy is the clearest case. The third bill above is $40 a month for something a small server running Postgres or Redis handles for the cost of the machine, with no per-write meter at all. At 50 million writes a month the same Workers bill is roughly $250, while the server has not changed price.

CPU-heavy is the second. The 10 millisecond free ceiling and the per-millisecond paid meter mean anything that does sustained parsing, image work or report generation is being billed for exactly the thing it does most. Teams building crawlers at the edge run into this quickly, since parsing a page of HTML blows through 10 milliseconds easily, and if what you actually need is the structured output rather than the raw markup, having a hosted service turn the page into clean structured data keeps that work off your own CPU meter entirely.

The third is state. Workers has no local disk and no bundled relational database, so anything stateful means KV, Durable Objects, D1 or an external database, each with its own meter. A single server with Postgres on it collapses all of those lines into the cost of the server.

What Cloudflare Workers is genuinely good at

It is worth being fair here, because the answer is not always a server. Workers is excellent at work that belongs in front of your application rather than inside it: redirects, A/B splits, auth checks at the edge, geographic routing, bot filtering and caching. All of that is read-heavy, low CPU, and runs in the free tier or close to it.

Static assets are free and unlimited on Workers, which makes it a genuinely strong host for a front end. If your site is a static build with a thin API in front of it, Workers at $0 to $5 a month is very hard to beat, and no server will match its global latency without a lot of work.

The honest split is that Workers is a very good edge layer and a poor application server. Plenty of teams run both: Workers in front for routing and caching, a server behind it for the application and database.

How Workers pricing compares to other platforms

Workers is priced per request and per CPU millisecond. Most platforms it gets compared against are priced per instance-hour or per plan seat, which makes direct comparison awkward. The useful question is what the whole stack costs once storage and bandwidth are counted.

For the same exercise on the platforms Workers is usually shortlisted against, we keep first-party rate cards for Vercel pricing and Netlify pricing, both of which bundle build minutes and bandwidth in ways Workers does not. On the data side, Supabase pricing and MongoDB Atlas pricing cover what the database half of a Workers stack costs, and Fly.io pricing is the closest thing to a per-second server equivalent.

Running the server side yourself

If the arithmetic above points you at a server, the work is provisioning it, securing it and deploying to it without downtime. That is what DeployManage does: it sets up the server on your own Cloudflare-fronted DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS or Vultr account, installs the stack, and handles zero downtime deploys from Git.

Workers in front and your own server behind it is a common and sensible architecture. Keep the edge layer for what it is cheap at and move the write-heavy, CPU-heavy, stateful work onto a machine with a flat price. If you want the detail on that side, managed versus unmanaged VPS and the production server setup checklist cover what running it properly involves.