Cloudflare Free Gives 10ms of CPU Per Request

Cloudflare Workers Free costs $0 and allows 100,000 requests a day, resetting at midnight UTC, with 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation, 128MB of memory, 50 subrequests and 100 Workers per account. Static assets on Pages are unmetered, but Pages Functions draw on the same Workers quota. Paid Workers starts at $5 a month.¹

Cloudflare's free tier splits cleanly in two, and the split explains most of the confusion about it. Serving files costs nothing and is effectively unlimited. Running code costs almost nothing, but the allowance per request is small enough that certain application shapes break against it.

The static half is the most generous free hosting available. The compute half is the most restrictive serverless offering of its kind.²

What the free plan actually includes

The daily limit is an account-level figure, not a per-Worker one. Every Worker and every Pages Function on the account draws from the same 100,000 requests, so a busy endpoint can starve a quiet one.

Ten milliseconds is CPU time, not clock time

This distinction saves a lot of people from a wrong conclusion. The limit counts processor time, not wall-clock duration. A Worker that waits two seconds for a database query pays almost nothing for the wait.

Cloudflare states that the average Worker consumes around 2.2 milliseconds per request. That leaves real room, and a simple router, an auth check or an API proxy fits comfortably.

What does not fit is anything that computes. Server-side rendering a React tree, parsing a large JSON payload, running crypto in the request path, or transforming images will approach or exceed 10 milliseconds on their own. When a Worker exceeds it, the request fails with error 1102 rather than being throttled.

This is the single most important thing to test before committing to Workers Free. Measure CPU time, not response time.

Pages is free hosting with a metered edge

A static site on Cloudflare Pages gets unlimited requests and unlimited bandwidth at no cost. Nothing else on the market is quite this generous, and for documentation sites, blogs and marketing pages it is the obvious choice.

Five hundred builds a month is ample for normal development, though the one-at-a-time concurrency limit means two people pushing simultaneously will queue.

The trap is that adding an API route turns your static site into a Workers consumer. A form handler that receives a few thousand submissions a day is fine. A form handler in front of a launch that goes viral is not, and it fails by returning error 1027 to everyone.

The daily reset is the cruel part

Midnight UTC is 00:00 in London, 05:30 in India and 16:00 in Los Angeles. Traffic that peaks during a US working day arrives after the reset and is fine. Traffic that peaks in the European morning exhausts the allowance before the US wakes up.

For sites with a single concentrated traffic window, the free quota can be consumed in a few hours and then the site returns errors until the next reset. There is no automatic spillover to paid and no way to buy additional requests on the free plan.

KV and D1 have their own small quotas

Workers KV on free allows 100,000 reads a day but only 1,000 writes, 1,000 deletes and 1,000 list operations, with 1GB of storage. The asymmetry matters: reads are the product, writes are a scarce resource.

D1, Cloudflare's SQLite service, includes 5 million rows read a day on free. That is workable for a small application and constraining for anything that scans tables.

When the free plan is enough

A static site or documentation portal with no server code. A Worker that routes, redirects, adds headers or proxies an API. A small side project whose traffic is measured in thousands of requests a day rather than tens of thousands.

For personal projects with no commercial intent, it is one of the best free tiers available, because the static half is genuinely unlimited. Vercel Hobby is the direct alternative, and it trades unmetered bandwidth for a licence that forbids commercial use outright.

When it stops being enough

The first request that needs more than 10 milliseconds of CPU, or the first day that crosses 100,000 requests. Paid Workers at $5 a month removes both ceilings, which makes this one of the cheaper upgrade thresholds in this series, closer to Railway's $5 Hobby floor than to Sentry or Linear.

Frequently asked questions

Is Cloudflare Workers free?
Yes. Workers Free allows 100,000 requests a day, 10ms of CPU per invocation and 100 Workers per account.

What is the Cloudflare Workers CPU limit on the free plan?
10 milliseconds of CPU time per request. Time spent waiting on network requests does not count toward it.

What happens at 100,000 requests a day?
Workers return error 1027 until the quota resets at midnight UTC. Nothing is charged.

Is Cloudflare Pages hosting really unlimited?
Static asset requests and bandwidth are unmetered. Pages Functions count against the Workers free quota of 100,000 requests a day.

How much does Cloudflare Workers cost?
The paid plan starts at $5 a month, including 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds.

Quotas, CPU limits and error codes verified against Cloudflare's Workers limits and pricing documentation on 20 October 2026.

Sources

1. Cloudflare Workers pricing: developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing. Used for: Per-request CPU ceiling, daily request limit and paid overage rates.
2. Cloudflare Workers limits: developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits.

All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.