The question of what Cloudflare costs has a short answer. The Free plan is enough for many websites. On paid plans, costs depend on services and usage. In this article I show which items come up and work through three examples. All amounts are list prices as of November 2026, in US dollars, as Cloudflare states them on its own pricing pages.
Two kinds of plans
At Cloudflare you pay in two places, and each follows its own rules. The first is your domain’s plan. It determines which features for delivery and protection are available.
According to Cloudflare’s plan overview, the Free plan costs $0. Pro costs $20 a month billed annually or $25 billed monthly. Business costs $200 a month billed annually or $250 billed monthly.
Cloudflare describes the Free plan as a plan for personal projects that aren’t business-critical. Pro is aimed at professional websites that aren’t business-critical, and Business at small businesses operating online. DDoS protection and a basic WAF ruleset are active on every domain, including on the Free plan. Whether your website needs more depends on how important it is to your business.
The second place is the developer platform with Workers and the storage services. There you pay by usage, and the paid plan applies to the whole account rather than to a single domain.
What Workers costs
At Cloudflare, websites and web apps run on Workers. According to the Workers price list, the free plan allows 100,000 requests a day. Each invocation may use up to 10 milliseconds of CPU time.
The paid plan costs at least $5 a month per account. It includes 10 million requests and 30 million milliseconds of CPU time a month. Each additional million requests costs $0.30. Each additional million milliseconds of CPU time costs $0.02.
For static websites, one sentence on the Static Assets page matters more. Requests to static files are free and unlimited, and storing them costs nothing. Only requests that run the Worker itself are billed by Cloudflare according to the Workers price list.
This website is mostly static. Only requests that run code on it, such as submitting the contact form, count toward the allowance.
Database and files
If your application needs data, you add storage services. Each of them has a free allowance.
- D1 is a database. The free plan includes 5 GB of storage, plus 5 million rows read and 100,000 rows written a day.
- With Workers Paid, D1 includes 25 billion rows read and 50 million rows written a month. Each GB above 5 GB costs $0.75 a month.
- Workers KV stores keys and values, for example as a cache. The free plan includes 1 GB of storage, 100,000 reads and 1,000 writes a day.
- With Workers Paid, KV includes 10 million reads and 1 million writes a month. Each additional GB costs $0.50 a month.
- R2 stores files. According to the R2 price list, 10 GB a month are free, and each additional GB costs $0.015 a month.
With R2, operations count too. Each month, 1 million Class A operations, such as uploads, are free. After that, each million costs $4.50. For Class B operations, such as retrieving files, 10 million are free, and after that each million costs $0.36. Cloudflare charges nothing for data transfer when files are downloaded from R2.
We use D1 for relational data and KV for caching. We store uploads and screenshots in R2.
Domain, email and access
Cloudflare Registrar says it charges at most the price that the registry and ICANN charge, without a markup. This applies to registration, transfer and renewal. As of November 2026, however, the .de extension isn’t on the list of extensions that Cloudflare Registrar offers. A .de domain therefore stays with its current provider, and only the DNS zone is at Cloudflare. You then keep paying the domain fee there.
With Email Routing, we forward addresses on your domain to your existing mailboxes, for example in Google Workspace. According to the Email Service price list, incoming email through Email Routing is unlimited on the free and the paid plan. The mailboxes themselves are billed by their provider.
We protect forms with Turnstile. The Turnstile Free plan costs nothing and covers up to 20 widgets. We put staging environments and admin interfaces behind Cloudflare Access. According to the Zero Trust pricing overview, the free plan is meant for up to 50 users. Beyond that, the pay-as-you-go plan costs $7 per user per month.
Three examples
I base the following examples on the list prices above.
A static business website with a contact form gets by on the free plan. Page views cost nothing, and 100,000 requests a day go a long way for the form. At Cloudflare you then pay $0 a month, plus the domain fee.
A website with a CMS such as EmDash generates its pages in the Worker. For a business website, I budget for Workers Paid at $5 a month in this case, because the free plan can reach its limit on a day with many visitors. By my calculation, the database and media stay within the included allowances for a few hundred pages. The detailed calculation is in the article moving WordPress to EmDash.
A small web app is, for example, an admin area with sign-in, a database and file uploads. Workers Paid costs $5 a month, and the database stays below 5 GB. If 50 GB of files are in R2, the 40 GB above the free allowance cost $0.60 a month. In total, that is $5.60 a month, as long as requests and operations stay within the included allowances.
What no price list shows
The work comes on top of the list prices. Someone has to set up Workers and storage. Domains, DNS and certificates also need to be configured. After that, the website and application need maintenance, monitoring and technical updates. We agree on the scope of this support with you before we start. For a project, we quote you a fixed price once the scope is clear.
You also decide who manages the account at Cloudflare. Either we take it on for you, or you keep it and give us the access we need. Code and domain belong to you in either case.
We show what we use Cloudflare for on the Cloudflare page. The hosting and operations page explains how we run your website or web app. Tell us what should run and how many visitors you expect. We then estimate the running costs together before we start.