Back to directory
Network & Connectivity Clouds

Cloudflare

A global edge network repositioned as a developer platform — Workers, Pages, R2, D1, Durable Objects, and Zero Trust.

The reinvention

Cloudflare started as a CDN and DDoS-protection layer. Over the past five years they have aggressively pushed into being a primary cloud — but they did it without building their own equivalent of EC2 or RDS. Instead, every Cloudflare service runs on the same global edge fabric they already operate, using lightweight V8 isolates instead of containers or VMs.

The result is a developer platform with a very different shape than AWS or GCP: stateless functions run within ~30 ms of any user on the planet, storage primitives are designed for edge-first applications, and almost everything bills by request rather than by reserved capacity.

The R2 announcement that changed pricing

R2 launched in 2022 with a single message that reshaped expectations: zero egress fees. For object storage workloads where bandwidth dominates the bill — backup, video, media, AI training data — R2 can be 10× cheaper than S3 once you account for transfer.

Free tier

Cloudflare’s free tier is unusually deep:

  • 100,000 Workers requests/day
  • 10 ms CPU time per request
  • 5 GB R2 storage and 10 GB Class A operations/month
  • 5 GB D1 storage, 5 million reads/day
  • Unlimited bandwidth on the CDN

For most personal projects, you may never hit a paid tier.

Workers paid plan

The $5/month Workers Paid unlocks 10 million requests, longer CPU limits, Durable Objects, Cron Triggers, and tail logs. Additional usage is metered per-request and per-GB.

When it fits

  • Globally distributed applications that need low p99 from every continent
  • Static frontends + lightweight APIs (Pages + Workers)
  • Media-heavy applications that benefit from R2’s egress economics
  • Security-first deployments using Zero Trust to replace VPNs and bastion hosts

When it doesn’t

Workers’ 128 MB memory and CPU-time limits make some long-running or memory-intensive workloads awkward. You will not run a transformer model or a kubernetes cluster on Cloudflare directly — pair it with another cloud for that tier of workload.

Inclusion criteria

Cloudflare meets all three criteria — fully published pricing, instant self-serve signup, and public SLAs plus a granular status page per service.