Cloudflare Workers pricing: free quota, overage and CPU limits — Hovvi

What happened

Combine a clear free or included quantity with explicit marginal rates and a user-controlled ceiling. Give developers a free boundary, included allowance, transparent overage and a cost-control mechanism.

Evidence

Observed facts

• The Workers Free plan includes 100,000 requests per day and up to 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation.
• The Workers Paid plan has a $5 monthly minimum and includes 10 million requests plus 30 million CPU milliseconds each month; additional usage is $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU milliseconds.
• Cloudflare states that static-asset requests are free and unlimited and that the paid plan adds no data-transfer or bandwidth charge.
• Cloudflare's worked example prices 15 million monthly requests averaging 7 milliseconds of CPU time at $8 total: $5 subscription, $1.50 request overage and $1.50 CPU overage.
• Cloudflare recommends a custom per-invocation CPU limit to reduce accidental runaway bills or denial-of-wallet attacks.

Editorial inference

• A two-meter product can remain understandable when allowance, marginal cost, a realistic bill and a hard ceiling appear in one explanation path.

Evidence views

1. Plan boundary
2. Meter definition
3. Worked cost example
4. Usage status
5. Limit control

Founder takeaway

Make the allowance, marginal cost, realistic bill and maximum exposure legible together.

Use when

• Usage dimensions can be measured independently
• Customers need both experimentation and production scale

Avoid when

• Multiple meters cannot be explained before use
• The service cannot enforce the advertised limit

Next implementation step

Design a developer-tool pricing and usage experience that explains allowance, marginal cost and maximum exposure before upgrade.

Acceptance criteria

• A user can state the free boundary and both paid meters without opening documentation
• A worked scenario reconciles allowance, overage and total cost
• The interface identifies which meter caused extra cost
• A hard CPU limit is visible before the user reaches it
• Historical rates cannot appear without their observation date

Related cases

• Same product, different decision: Cloudflare Workers Playground first-run flow — Hovvi

  The first-run flow proves execution before sign-up while the pricing case explains the usage meter that governs continued operation.

• Different usage meter: OpenAI API token-based pricing pattern — Hovvi

  Both charge for infrastructure consumption but expose different counted units and cost controls.

• Portfolio pricing to product meter: Cloudflare Workers public product evaluation flow — Hovvi

  The evaluation path shows the portfolio-level plan architecture while the meter case explains the Workers-specific allowance, overage and cost guardrail.

Version history

Current snapshot: snap_cloudflare_workers_pricing_2026_08_25 — Expanded the Cloudflare pricing child case with exact observed meters, one official cost example and the documented CPU guardrail.

Use with an Agent

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