Cloudflare Pricing in 2026: Free, Pro, Business and What Workers Really Costs

Cloudflare's website plans cost $0, $20 or $200 a month per domain on annual billing ($25 and $250 if you pay monthly). Workers starts at $5 a month. Neither number predicts your bill very well, because the plans attach to a domain and the developer products run on separate usage meters. A small site can stay on Free for years. An app built on Workers, R2 and D1 gets a usage bill that has nothing to do with the plan on its domain.

So treat this as two pricing models under one logo. All figures below come from Cloudflare's plans page and developer docs as of November 2026. Confirm them there before you commit.

The Short Version

▸Free: $0. CDN, DDoS protection, SSL, DNS, WAF, 70 rules. Community support only.
▸Pro: $20/month annual, $25 monthly. 225 rules, lossless image optimization, ticket support.
▸Business: $200/month annual, $250 monthly. 450 rules, chat support, 100% uptime SLA with service credits.
▸Contract (Enterprise): no public price. 2,700 rules, 24x7 phone support, bigger SLA credits.
▸Workers: free for 100,000 requests a day, then $5/month for 10 million requests plus 30 million CPU milliseconds.
▸R2: $0.015/GB-month with free egress.

My recommendation: start on Free, and don't move to Pro until you can name the feature you need. Workers at $5 is the easier yes if you're running anything real on it.

What Free Actually Includes

Free is the reason most people end up at Cloudflare, and it deserves the reputation. You get the global CDN, DDoS mitigation, SSL and DNS for $0, with no bill for bandwidth on the CDN.

Limits are real, though. Support means community forums and docs, so when something breaks at 2 a.m. you're on your own. You also get 70 rules and 10,000 bulk redirects, which is fine for a blog and tight for a large site migration.

Bigger catch: "unlimited bandwidth" has terms attached. Cloudflare's service-specific CDN terms restrict serving video and other heavy non-web content through the CDN unless you use a paid product built for it, like Stream, Images or R2. Read them if you plan to push large media files.

Another thing worth pricing in is lock-in. Free is great until Cloudflare is your DNS, proxy, WAF and redirect engine all at once. Leaving is possible, but it's a project.

Pro vs Business: A Tenfold Jump

Going from Pro to Business costs 10x. Here's what that money buys, based on the plan table:

▸Rules: 225 on Pro, 450 on Business.
▸Support: tickets on Pro. Tickets plus chat on Business.
▸SLA: none on Pro. 100% uptime with 1x service credits on Business.
▸Video: both include 100 minutes of Stream storage and 10,000 minutes of delivery.

Pro is cheap enough that the decision rarely matters much. Pay for it if you want a human to answer a ticket, or if your site carries enough images that lossless optimization makes a visible difference. Otherwise stay on Free.

Business is a harder sell. For $200 a month you mostly get an SLA, chat support and more rules. If you run a store where an hour of downtime costs more than a year of the plan, that's easy to justify. A content site with no contract obligations should skip it. Also keep in mind what a 1x credit means: you get money back on a $200 plan, not compensation for lost revenue.

One point the table glosses over: it marks WAF as included on every tier, Free too. That doesn't mean every tier gets the same rule depth, so check what's in the managed rulesets for your plan before you tell a security team you're covered.

Contract Pricing Has No Rate Card

Above Business you talk to sales. Cloudflare publishes no number, and I won't guess one. Third-party "starting at" figures for Enterprise are unreliable, so ignore them.

Heavy self-serve users should know one thing: complaints show up regularly on Hacker News and Reddit from sites pushing lots of traffic on flat plans who get contacted by sales about moving to a contract. If your business model depends on very high traffic through a $20 plan, get clarity early rather than building around an assumption.

What Workers Really Costs

Workers is where the pricing gets interesting and, for most apps, surprisingly low. Paid Standard has a $5 monthly minimum:

▸Requests: 10 million included, then $0.30 per million.
▸CPU time: 30 million milliseconds included, then $0.02 per million milliseconds.
▸Egress: no charge.

Free gives you 100,000 requests a day with a 10 ms CPU limit per invocation. Paid raises the default to 30 seconds and lets you configure up to 5 minutes.

CPU billing is the detail that makes this cheap. You pay for compute time, not wall-clock time, so a Worker waiting on a slow database call isn't running up the meter. Three examples:

▸Small API, 9M requests a month at 5 ms each: $5 base plus 15M extra CPU ms ($0.30). About $5.30.
▸Busy app, 50M requests at 7 ms: $5 base, $12 in requests, $6.40 in CPU. About $23.40.
▸Large app, 500M requests at 10 ms: $5 base, $147 in requests, $99.40 in CPU. About $251.40.

Those totals are for Workers alone. Storage products bill separately, and that's usually where the estimate goes wrong.

Now the honest downside. Workers runs on V8 isolates, not a regular Node server. Node compatibility has improved a lot, but it isn't complete, so test anything leaning on native modules or filesystem assumptions before you commit.

If you're weighing this against a per-seat platform, read our Vercel pricing breakdown and Vercel vs Netlify comparison. Workers doesn't charge per developer, which matters more as a team grows.

R2: The Egress Argument

R2's pitch is simple. Storage is $0.015/GB-month, and egress is free.

▸Standard: $0.015/GB-month. Class A operations $4.50/million, Class B $0.36/million.
▸Infrequent Access: $0.01/GB-month, Class A $9.00/million, Class B $0.90/million, $0.01/GB retrieval, 30-day minimum.
▸Free tier (Standard only): 10 GB-month, 1 million Class A, 10 million Class B.

Take 1 TB stored, 2 million Class A and 20 million Class B operations a month. R2 comes to $14.85 + $4.50 + $3.60, or $22.95, no matter how much data leaves.

AWS S3 Standard storage for that terabyte is about $23 at roughly $0.023/GB, nearly the same. Egress is where they split. Serve 5 TB a month from S3 at roughly $0.09/GB and you're paying over $400 on top. If your workload is read-heavy and public-facing, R2 wins easily. If your data sits in the same AWS region as your compute and rarely leaves, the savings shrink and you give up S3's deeper tooling. Our MinIO vs AWS S3 post covers the self-hosted route.

KV, D1, Durable Objects and Queues

Each has its own meter on the paid plan:

▸KV: 10M reads included then $0.50/million. 1M writes included then $5.00/million. Writes cost ten times what reads do, so don't use it as a write-heavy database.
▸D1: 25 billion rows read included then $0.001/million. 50M rows written included then $1.00/million. 5 GB storage included then $0.75/GB-month. Billing counts rows scanned, so a missing index costs real money at scale.
▸Durable Objects: 1M requests included then $0.15/million, 400,000 GB-seconds included then $12.50/million GB-seconds.
▸Queues: 1M operations included then $0.40/million.

Small projects may never see an overage. Chatty designs do, like one user action triggering a dozen KV writes.

Add-Ons That Change the Total

▸Smart Shield + Argo Smart Routing: starting at $5/month.
▸Load Balancing: starting at $5/month.
▸Advanced Certificate Manager: $10/month.
▸Images: 5,000 unique transformations free, then $0.50/thousand. $5 per 100,000 stored, $1 per 100,000 delivered.
▸Stream: $5 per 1,000 minutes stored, $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered.
▸Zero Trust: free to 50 users, then $7/user/month pay-as-you-go.

Read "starting at" as a floor, not a price. Zero Trust's cliff matters too: at 51 users, budget about $357 a month if every seat is billed, up from $0.

Pros and Cons

What's good:

▸Free tier covers CDN, DDoS and SSL with no bandwidth bill
▸Workers and R2 charge nothing for egress
▸Published rates for the developer products

What's not:

▸Free has no human support
▸Pro to Business is a 10x jump for a short list of additions
▸No public Enterprise pricing
▸CDN terms limit heavy media use outside paid products
▸Many separate meters make forecasts harder than a flat plan

Who Should Buy What

▸Blog or small business site: Free. Skip Pro until you want ticket support.
▸Image-heavy store or client site: Pro at $20 is cheap insurance.
▸Revenue-critical site with SLA obligations: Business, and read the credit terms first.
▸Side project or small API: Workers Free, then $5 when you hit the daily limit.
▸Public file or asset delivery: R2, especially if you pay real egress today.
▸Large traffic or compliance needs: get a contract quote, and compare with what we covered in DigitalOcean vs Cloudflare. You can also see the Cloudflare product page for a feature rundown.

Bottom Line

Cloudflare's Free plan is the best deal in web infrastructure, and most small sites should stop there. Pro is fine if you want support. Business only makes sense when an SLA has real value to you. Workers and R2 are cheap for what they do, but budget them from your own request counts and CPU time rather than the $5 headline, and watch the storage meters closely.