— Field data
What Cloudflare Workers actually costs.
Workers pricing worked through with real monthly examples, benchmarked against the AWS Lambda + API Gateway equivalent. Written by a team that ships on Workers for a living.
The short answer
Cloudflare Workers is free up to roughly 3 million requests a month. Beyond that, the Paid plan is 5 USD a month and includes 10 million requests plus 30 million CPU-milliseconds; past that it is about 0.30 USD per additional million requests and 0.02 USD per additional million CPU-ms. A service doing 100 million requests a month at 5 ms of CPU each costs about 41 USD a month on Workers, versus roughly 121 USD a month on AWS Lambda with API Gateway. That is before egress, which Workers does not charge and AWS does.
Compiled July 2026
— The pricing
How Workers is billed.
Free plan
Around 100,000 requests a day (~3 million a month), with a 10 ms CPU cap per request. Enough to run a real marketing site or a low-traffic API at no cost.
Paid plan: 5 USD a month
Includes 10 million requests and 30 million CPU-milliseconds. No per-seat fee, no memory tier to size, no cold-start charges.
Beyond the included usage
About 0.30 USD per additional 1 million requests, and about 0.02 USD per additional 1 million CPU-milliseconds. You pay for compute time, not wall-clock time spent waiting on an upstream.
What you do not pay for
No egress/bandwidth charges, no API-gateway front door, no NAT or load-balancer line items. On AWS those are often the largest part of the bill.
— Worked examples
Three real workloads, both platforms.
| Monthly requests | Cloudflare Workers | AWS Lambda + API Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| 1 million requests / month | 0 USD (free tier) | ~1.21 USD |
| 10 million requests / month | ~5.40 USD | ~12.10 USD |
| 100 million requests / month | ~41.40 USD | ~121 USD (+ egress) |
Assumes 5 ms of CPU per request (typical for edge-rendered SSR; AI-inference workloads bill mostly as wait time, which is a different model). AWS figures are Lambda at 128 MB in us-east-1 plus API Gateway (HTTP API), which a Lambda needs to serve HTTP, and exclude egress.
— Methodology
How these numbers were built.
Figures compiled July 2026 from Cloudflare's published Workers pricing and AWS's published Lambda + API Gateway pricing (us-east-1, 128 MB, x86). They are an order-of-magnitude comparison for an HTTP workload, not a quote. Real bills vary with CPU profile, request shape, and egress. Cloudflare's own billing is more nuanced than the flat per-CPU-ms figure used here, and AWS adds egress at roughly 0.09 USD per GB, which is not in the table. Verify current pricing on each provider's plans page before you budget.
— Model your own
Move the sliders.
There is an interactive version: set your monthly requests and average CPU-ms, and it shows the estimate and tier with Lambda alongside.
Open the Workers cost calculator— Questions
Common ones.
Is Cloudflare Workers really cheaper than AWS Lambda?
For an HTTP workload, usually yes: often by 2 to 3 times before egress, and more once egress is counted. A Worker is the HTTP endpoint itself, so there is no API Gateway, no memory tier, no cold-start fee, and no bandwidth charge. AWS bills all of those separately, and egress alone (around 0.09 USD per GB) can exceed the compute cost.
What is a "CPU-millisecond" and why is it billed separately?
It is the actual processor time your code runs, not the wall-clock time a request takes. If your Worker calls an AI model and waits two seconds, you are billed for the few milliseconds of your own code. That is why AI-heavy Workers stay cheap.
When does Workers stop being free?
Around 3 million requests a month, or when you need more than 10 ms of CPU per request. At that point the Paid plan (5 USD a month) covers a large amount of real traffic before per-unit charges begin.
Do you build on Workers?
Yes. It is the platform we know best. We build edge-native software on Workers, D1, R2, Vectorize, Durable Objects, and Workers AI, and we publish open-source Workers templates. If you are weighing a migration, send a brief.
— Engage
Weighing Workers for real?
Tell us the workload in two paragraphs: traffic, what it does, where it runs today. We reply in writing within one business day.