I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s.
The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#...
Capping it at 100K requests is a lot easier, because it's a single number that can be incremented easily in a distributed way.
It's the same reason it took AWS forever to offer billing caps, and even today, they label it as best effort. They don't guarantee you won't pay more than your set limit.
Let’s make a thought experiment.
CEO of Cloudflare introduces hard billing caps at a _business_ (not technical) level. Your organization will never be billed more than the level you set. Your app may stop, or may continue running, but above the monthly cap it’s free for you, it becomes Cloudflare’s expense if they didn’t pause the services.
I guarantee you that in this case, all technical issues you’re talking about would be solved in three weeks, and your service would go down within 3 seconds after hitting the cap.
If CEO decision were that any over-usage above the cap is deducted from employee bonuses from the specific product division that didn’t stop spending in time — all technical challenges would be solved in 48 hours.
Currently, there are literally zero organizational incentives for CloudFlare to develop any usage caps
(I get that they're not happy to do that.)
If your company is on an enterprise plan, at least for us all of the limits are pre-negotiated and prepaid, and you aren’t billed for overages (although if you consistently overage, sales will start badgering you to negotiate a limit increase, but my experience is you can simply ignore their demands and they eventually go away)
It does drive me crazy that their enterprise tier “caps” bandwidth. Our company overaged on one of our domains, so we moved the domain out of our enterprise license onto a self-serve plan, and like magic, back to unlimited bandwidth.
> If Customer exceeds any of the Total Quantity for the Services below, Cloudflare will invoice Customer in arrears at a rate that corresponds to the rate set forth in the table after this one labeled “Excess Usage Pricing.” If no such Excess Usage Pricing table has been added by the Parties to this order form or if such table does not include the Service(s) for which Customer has exceeded the Total Quantity, then the Parties will negotiate in good faith an increase in the Fees for such Service(s). Should the Parties fail to reach an agreement on an increase within thirty (30) days of Customer’s receipt of notice from Cloudflare that Customer has exceeded its usage cap for the Service(s), Cloudflare will have the right to immediately terminate such Service for its convenience, and without liability to Customer or any third party.
You don't see how the spend cap is linked to the bandwidth cap?
There's your next feature to port, Cloudflare: PEACE OF MIND!
They prefer waiving the occasional DDoS / misconfiguration over giving their customers to cause outages with something so trivially forgotten about and so disconnected from the tech and actual platform.
also its funny that i have a backup to cloudflare in case it goes down—that seems to be a regular event now as of lately with CF
"Oh that thing that was an experiment and had billing caps turned on but we rushed in to production and now the whole business relies on that thing is in an outage and destroying customer trust we've barely earned yet"
I get the flip side but... 2nd order effects oof.
Also, if it's really a problem or you are estimating it'll certainly be a problem, do email alerts or a strict shutdown if xx requests are hitting your account. You can have a simple counter in a KV.
Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.
Turnstiles per minute.
Turnstile isn't something Cloudflare put up to annoy you. It's what the website owners decided to put up, for many different reasons.
In the same vein, Anubis has a default configuration that lets honest scrapers and crawlers through, because those can easily be rejected by basic web server configurations. Only scrapers pretending to be browsers need to solve the proof-of-work puzzle. You can disable that feature, of course.
Cloudflare may play this smart: force bots to pay for access, then take 30% of the cut and give the rest to the website owners. That way, websites get paid when the AI slop machine digests their content. Normal visitors get in for free, turn the scraper hellscape into a sustainable model. Bonus points for letting websites set their own rates (pre-declared to scrapers, of course) to dissuade all but the most interested scrapers.
Except for the unfortunate minority of normal visitors who always get misclassified as bots and get denied access regularly.
I wouldn’t be complaining if Cloudflare’s misclassifier bit any user with the same small probability. But it keeps biting the same users over and over again.
> Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.
Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.
This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.
I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.
% npx wrangler deploy --temporary
wrangler 4.103.0
────────────────────
You must accept Cloudflare's Terms of Service (https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/) and Privacy Policy (https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/) in order to continue. By typing "yes", you agree to these terms. Type "yes" to continue. … yes
Solving proof-of-work challenge…
Temporary account ready:
Account: Educated Celery (created)
Claim within: 60 minutes
Claim URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/claim-preview?claimToken=CAVe7LzWiGad-redacted
Total Upload: 13.79 KiB / gzip: 4.12 KiB
Uploaded cloudflare-redirect-resolver (2.27 sec)
Deployed cloudflare-redirect-resolver triggers (0.50 sec)
https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers.dev
Current Version ID: 5c12da7f-2749-4ccc-a8f6-79b85da98d10
as far as i’m aware, that’s fully binding and often an accepted practise - take Minecraft’s server software, where you must accept the EULA with a text flag before running
The limits are 100 workers on free and 500 on paid.
And if need more then you can always go their platform which supports tenancy.
As long as you have a cronjob or similar to clean up the cost of having per PR preview is pretty much zero.
On the other hand, we already use regular CF builds for frontend previews, but that doesnt solve a fullstack PR preview much
Uh that's already true?
- simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.
- You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store). These aren't considered "lockin".
- workers is "lockin" - not similar enough to lambda/cloud functions and so becomes CF specific.
Not having a simple container based compute piece has made me hesitate in taking up CF. (Fly or firebase won out)
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...
I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean. Do you have specific use cases in mind outside of the worker invocation model? If so, I'm curious what you'd want to run on Cloudflare. Otherwise, workers don't have to be much of a "lockin" if treated as a thin layer, more like configuration.
> You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store).
Instead, if you mean accessing these resources from containers, it's a bit clunky [0] but it's there - you should be able to access worker bindings from containers through those outbound handlers.
[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/platform-detail...
Agreed. I wish CF had something like Azure's new fast-starting Express containers.
This would only work if they would provision docker image deployment, similar to google cloud run, but the still, everything serveless has its own caveats…
The latest models appear to know CF Workers inside out and are very capable of doing that if you ask them to.
Here's my GPT-5.5 xhigh + Codex Desktop transcript building one just now: https://gist.github.com/simonw/264bd6b8a39fc34c91c9c867454c6... - code here: https://github.com/simonw/cloudflare-redirect-resolver
What makes you say that?
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/claim-dep...
If it helps laugh DDoS attacks they would be incentivized to do the exact opposite. They can charge more for “protection” then.
A “create account” button accessible to me would be so much better. Then, I create the account and invite the client to join as owner.
The system I follow is creating a new account for the client using a plus-code on my email address (like john+client10@example.com), then I invite my main account (john@example.com), then I can invite clients into that account. Its a PITA.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/enterprise-grade-features-for-al...
This could lead to people having a large amount of separate accounts.
It says to claim you can either sign up or sign in.
https://snail-game.solstice-barometer.workers.dev/
pretty cool.
The right model for agentic API usage is having LLMs write scripts that use APIs. Connecting agents to MCPs and telling them to go and do stuff over and over not only wastes money but invites catastrophe.
The article worded it perfectly; friction-less "efforts"