Cloudflare Free Logs Stop at 0.5 GB a Day, and You Cannot Buy More

From 1 December 2026, all Cloudflare logs and traces move onto a single pricing model. Free accounts get 0.5 GB of ingestion per day with seven-day retention, no option to buy more, and ingestion stops when the daily cap is reached until it resets at 00:00 UTC. Paid plans include 50 GB per billing cycle and 10 GB-month of storage, then charge $0.25 per GB ingested and $0.10 per GB-month stored.¹

The detail worth dwelling on is the refusal to sell. Almost every free tier in this market ends by asking for a card. This one ends by switching the logging off, and for a certain kind of site that is the worse outcome.

What does the new meter actually cover?

The allowance is shared across every logs and traces product rather than metered per service. That list is longer than the name suggests:²

Prices measured on 27 October 2026. Vendor plan terms, allowances and prices change without notice, so treat every figure on this page as a dated snapshot rather than a permanent fact. Where a number here differs from the vendor's own pricing page, the vendor's page is correct and the figure above is simply older than it.

Cloudflare Traces, Workers Logs, Workers Traces, Containers logs, R2 Data Access Logs, AI Gateway logs and Issues all draw on the same pool. Log Explorer datasets are the exception: they carry their own price of $1 per GB ingested with 30-day retention and do not consume the pooled allowance.

Ingestion is measured pre-compression and excludes dropped events. Storage is measured in GB-month using the highest amount of queryable data on each day, so one gigabyte kept for a full month counts as one GB-month.

Why is the free cap stricter than it sounds?

Half a gigabyte a day sounds like roughly fifteen gigabytes a month, which sounds generous next to a 50 GB paid allowance. It is not the same thing, because the free cap is daily and there is no monthly smoothing.

A single noisy deploy that emits verbose logs for an hour can exhaust the day's allowance before lunch. When that happens Cloudflare stops ingesting new data entirely until the reset at 00:00 UTC. Stored data remains queryable for its seven-day retention, so history survives, but nothing new arrives.

On a paid plan the same spike costs a few dollars and the logs keep flowing. On free, you lose the ability to observe the exact incident that generated the logs. That is a deployment-retro problem: the failure you most need to debug is the one that turns the meter off.

Workers Logs is the group that actually changes

Existing Workers Observability customers on Free, Pro and Business move automatically on 1 December. Nobody opts in, and nobody is grandfathered.

The old allowance for Workers Logs was expressed in events, not bytes. The new one is bytes, and Cloudflare does not provide a conversion, because the answer depends entirely on how large your log lines are. A service logging compact structured lines might fit hundreds of thousands of events into a gigabyte; one logging verbose JSON with stack traces might fit tens of thousands.

Anyone budgeting on the old event number needs to measure their actual bytes before December rather than assume equivalence in either direction. There is no per-event figure in the new model at all.

The part that did not get worse

Two things in this change are genuinely generous and worth stating plainly.

There are no retroactive charges. Ingestion charges apply only to data received on or after 1 December, and Cloudflare explicitly does not back-charge for earlier usage. Paid accounts start accruing storage from whatever is retained on 1 December, which is the only backward-looking element and it is modest.

And Logpush, which used to require an Enterprise contract, is now available on all self-serve plans with 25 GB of free exports per month to Cloudflare or external destinations. For a small team that wanted to ship logs to an external store, that previously meant Enterprise. Now it does not.

How do you size yourself before December?

Start with the observable number. In the Cloudflare dashboard, Workers and Pages gives per-Worker metrics, and observability usage is visible under Billable Usage for accounts that already have it.

If you are near the free ceiling, the decisions are structurally different depending on which way you are over.

If you are slightly over, sample before you store. Cloudflare says sampling data before storage reduces both ingestion and storage. Dropping debug-level lines in production usually takes a service comfortably under any cap and costs you nothing you were reading anyway.

If you are far over, the $5 Workers Paid plan includes 50 GB a cycle, which is a hundred times the free daily allowance. For anyone running a production service, that is the cheapest observability decision on the platform, and the plan costs $5 a month rather than the $20-plus the category usually asks.

What this says about the free tier

Cloudflare's free plan has always been the most useful free tier in developer infrastructure, and this change does not alter the headline products: Workers at 100,000 requests a day, 10 ms of CPU per request, static assets, DNS and the CDN all remain free.

What it does is draw the observability line more firmly. The 10 ms CPU limit already makes the free Workers plan unsuitable for heavy server-side rendering. Now the log cap makes it unsuitable for debugging a busy service, in a way that fails silently and at the worst moment.

The same pattern has run through every plan change this month. Gemini's free tier lost its better models. Google is closing Jules and its free tier outright. GitHub shipped Copilot Fusion to Free but paywalled its effort levels. Free tiers are not disappearing; they are being redrawn at exactly the point where a professional starts depending on them.

Cloudflare's version is the clearest of the lot, because it does not ask you to upgrade. It just stops. The verdict: if you run anything production-shaped on Workers, budget $5 for the paid plan now rather than discovering the cap mid-incident.

Frequently asked questions

When does the new Cloudflare logs pricing start?
1 December 2026. Enterprise accounts move at contract renewal instead.

What does the free plan include?
0.5 GB of ingestion per day with seven-day retention. Additional ingestion cannot be purchased on Free.

What happens when a free account hits the daily cap?
Cloudflare stops ingesting new data until the allowance resets at 00:00 UTC. Stored data stays queryable for seven days.

Are there catch-up charges for past usage?
No. Only data received on or after 1 December is charged.

Does Workers Logs still use its event allowance?
No. It moves onto the byte-based Observability model on the same date, and Cloudflare publishes no event-to-byte conversion.

Is Logpush still Enterprise only?
No. It is available on all self-serve plans with 25 GB of free monthly export, then $0.03 per GB to internal destinations or $0.10 per GB to external ones.

Plan allowances, rates, the 1 December cutover, the 00:00 UTC reset behaviour, retention terms, Logpush availability and the absence of retroactive charges verified in Cloudflare's Observability pricing documentation (last updated 25 October 2026) and its Logpush pricing page (last updated 12 October 2026), both read on 3 November 2026. Workers free-tier request and CPU limits from the Workers limits page.

Sources

1. Cloudflare Observability: Pricing: developers.cloudflare.com/observability/pricing. Used for: The 1 December model, free and paid allowances, the daily stop, retention and retroactive-charge rules.
2. Cloudflare Logs: Logpush pricing: developers.cloudflare.com/logs/logpush/pricing. Used for: Logpush destination rates and the 25 GB monthly export allowance.
3. Cloudflare Workers: Limits: developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits. Used for: Free-tier request and CPU limits for Workers.

All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 27 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.