How much does Cloudflare Workers cost in 2026? The real bill

In brief

• Workers Free: 100,000 requests/day, 10 ms CPU per request. Enough for a prototype or a small site.
• Workers Paid: $5/month, 10 million requests included then $0.30/million. No egress fees.
• R2 (storage): $0.015/GB/month, free egress, unlike S3 (about $0.09/GB).
• D1 (edge SQL): 25 billion rows read included/month, then $0.001/million. Storage from $0.75/GB.
• In production, a typical SMB app runs for $5 to $20/month on Cloudflare, where AWS can exceed $50 because of egress.

The free plan (Workers Free)

Cloudflare offers a generous free plan, no credit card required:

• Workers: 100,000 requests/day, 10 ms of CPU per invocation.
• R2: 10 GB of storage, 1 million write operations (Class A), 10 million reads (Class B) per month.
• D1: 5 million rows read/day, 100,000 rows written/day, 5 GB of storage.
• KV: 100,000 reads/day, 1,000 writes/day, 1 GB stored.

That's enough for a prototype, a dynamic brochure site or a low-traffic API. Beyond that, you need the paid plan.

The paid plan (Workers Paid: $5/month)

The paid plan costs $5 USD per month, all included. It unlocks much wider limits and adds features (Durable Objects, Vectorize, Queues, Logpush). Pricing is usage-based, with no egress or bandwidth fees.

Workers (compute)

• Requests: 10 million included/month, then $0.30/million additional requests.
• CPU time: 30 million ms CPU included/month, then $0.02/million ms CPU. Up to 5 minutes of CPU per invocation (30 s by default).
• Egress: free, unlimited. This is the biggest difference with AWS.

Example: a Worker serving 15 million requests/month at 7 ms average CPU costs $8/month ($5 subscription + $1.50 requests + $1.50 CPU). A site at 100 million requests/month costs about $45/month.

R2 (file storage, S3 alternative)

• Storage: $0.015/GB/month (Standard). 10 GB included.
• Class A operations (writes, uploads): $4.50/million. 1 million included.
• Class B operations (reads, downloads): $0.36/million. 10 million included.
• Egress: free. The key point: on S3, 1 TB out costs about $90; on R2, it's $0.

Concrete example: serving 1 TB of files per month from R2 costs about $15 (storage only, no egress). The same on S3 costs $90+ in egress fees alone. For a site serving images, PDFs or videos, the gap is measured in hundreds of euros per month.

D1 (serverless SQL at the edge)

• Rows read: 25 billion included/month, then $0.001/million rows.
• Rows written: 50 million included/month, then $1.00/million rows.
• Storage: 5 GB included, then $0.75/GB/month.
• Egress: free.

D1 is billed by rows read/written, not by request count. A SELECT on a 5,000-row table without an index counts 5,000 rows read. With an index on the filtered column, it can read only a few dozen. Indexing your tables well divides the D1 bill. This site (buildoto.com) reads all its content from D1 at the edge, and the bill stays negligible.

Workers AI and Vectorize (AI at the edge)

• Vectorize (vector database): 50 million vector dimensions queried included/month, then $0.01/million. 10 million dimensions stored included, then $0.05/100 million.
• Workers AI: billed per neuron (AI compute unit), 10,000 neurons/day free, then priced per model.

For a production RAG (chatbot on documents) for an SMB, the AI cost stays low: a few thousand vectors, a few hundred requests/day, and you run for under $10/month of Workers AI + Vectorize. The most expensive item remains the generation LLM API (Mistral, OpenAI), not the Cloudflare infrastructure.

Real production costs: 3 worked examples

1. Dynamic marketing site (like buildoto.com)

A Next.js site deployed via OpenNext, content read from D1 on every request:

• Workers: about 300,000 requests/month = $5/month (all within the plan).
• D1: about 2 million rows read/month = $0 (well within the 25 billion included).
• R2: about 500 MB of assets = $0 (within the 10 GB included).
• Total: $5/month.

2. B2B SaaS API with auth and storage

• Workers: about 5 million requests/month, 5 ms average CPU = $5/month (within the plan).
• R2: 50 GB of files, 500,000 reads/month = about $1/month (storage).
• D1: about 10 million rows read/month = $0 (included).
• Total: about $6/month.

3. Document RAG (chatbot on 1,000 documents)

• Workers: about 100,000 requests/month = $5/month (plan).
• Vectorize: 10,000 vectors x 768 dimensions, 1,000 requests/month = about $0.30/month.
• R2: 2 GB of documents = $0 (included).
• LLM API (Mistral): about 500 requests/month = about $5-15/month (depending on the model).
• Total: $10-20/month. The dominant item is the LLM API, not Cloudflare.

Cloudflare Workers vs AWS Lambda: the comparison that matters

Both are serverless, but the bill is completely different as soon as data goes out.

• Requests: Workers $0.30/M (10M included) vs Lambda $0.20/M (1M included). Lambda is cheaper per request but includes 10x less free volume.
• Egress: Workers $0 vs Lambda/S3 about $0.09/GB. This is where Cloudflare wins: 1 TB/month out = $0 on R2, about $90 on S3.
• Cold start: Workers about 0 ms (V8 isolates) vs Lambda 200-1000 ms cold. Not a cost, but a direct UX impact.
• Storage: R2 $0.015/GB vs S3 $0.023/GB, and R2 has no egress fees.

When Lambda still makes sense: if you're already on AWS, use VPC, RDS, or deep AWS services (SQS, EventBridge), and your egress is internal (between AWS services). But as soon as you serve content to the Internet, AWS egress dominates the bill.

Building on Cloudflare Workers

Knowing the pricing is one thing; using the platform efficiently is another. The classic pitfalls: D1 without indexes (rows-read bill explodes), Workers running too long in CPU, misconfigured R2. That's what I run on beforbuild.com (my B2B SaaS in production) and adapt to your need.

If you have a Cloudflare project (edge API, RAG, AWS migration, full app), let's talk: my Cloudflare Workers service, fixed price from €440 excl. tax, free 30-min audit.

Sources

• Cloudflare Workers · official pricing
• Cloudflare R2 · official pricing
• Cloudflare D1 · official pricing